Interactive effects are the future

Brian Eno once said something like, "Effects are the future." Since I can't find the exact quote, I get to make up what he meant by it.

Computers get a bum rap from many artists, partly because machines have long been assigned the wrong role in the creative process. They were touted as substitutes for human judgment which demeans both machines and humans.

What computers are good at is storage and variation without prejudice. This means that, like a creative ad agency, they produce a lot of weird and trivial stuff. But every so often they make something that is interesting: valid, beautiful, useful, unexpected, out of the blue, sensible, open to competing interpretations, concrete, emotionally resonant, inspiring, generative, worth thinking about. And as Paul Arden said, a few of those usually make up for all the other crap.

I've been using Ableton Live for some time now because I find it relatively easy to produce things I find interesting with it. That is largely because I focus on the accretive, almost geological, application of filters and other sorts of effects rather than trying to produce interestingness ex nihilo. I tend to start with a simple melody or rhythm, then add or subtract multiple effects and connect them via a few parameters so that there is a little bit of feedback going on. A little bit of interaction between the elements of a mix is important because it means that the ultimate result is coherent. The ear perceives a relationship between the sounds even if I didn't put it there explicitly. And coherence is what distinguishes an interesting result from a beautiful mess.

A few days ago, I discovered Motion, Apple's motion graphics program contained in Final Cut Studio. I now divide my life into Before and After Motion. Motion uses visual effects in a way that is similar to Live and other music software. With just a few filters exchanging a little bit of information over and over again, something big and complex and interesting can pop out. And since Live and Motion can also exchange some information, you can create interesting synesthesias with just a few clicks: Download Synesthetic mandala

The fact that this looks like an animated Grateful Dead logo begs the distinction between interesting (active) and mesmerizing (passive). In fact, there is some discussion among educational psychologists as to whether interesting material actually requires less active attention than boring material. It seems likely that we process interesting things more deeply, creating a mental model of the relationships between the parts which we can then manipulate, trying out variations not explicitly defined in the original material, rather than simply applying more attention to interpret it verbatim as we do with boring material. Which means:

1. As a brand holder, you want people to process your messages at this deeper level. Interestingness is much more powerful and inexpensive than effective frequency.
2. Interesting brands are brands that people find it easy and pleasurable to generate variations on. Generativity is a way to measure interestingness and should be a core brand measure.
3. We learn and create by generating and trying out possible variations on things. Like computers. And neither humans nor computers are demeaned by this shared characteristic.

Comments

[Anjali]

Very good post. I'm interested in what you say about interesting being active and mesmerizing being passive, however. Isn't mesmerizing one level above interesting? And if so, isn't that more active, hardly passive? Unless you mean boredom is mesmerizing by virtue of requiring more attention to interpret it as boring.

Like what you say about generativity being a measure of interestingness. That's a rather original thought in these days of - ahem - social media. I'm not quite sure I agree with it universally - in some cases, like Volkswagen's latest interactive ad: http://tinyurl.com/l3vabd, you can generate stuff but it's rather boring. I wouldn't take that to mean VW is an interesting brand. Overall though, brands that let me generate info do make me think they are interesting.

BTW I like your posts, you should post more often!

[Jeffre Jackson]

I think of being mesmerized as a zombie-like state in which the conscious mind slips into neutral, like being hypnotized. Perhaps stronger than interestingness in the degree of immediate enthrallment, but without engagement. There is no questioning or mental-model creation and manipulation. Just a mouth-hanging-open stillness. But really that's just my definition of the word.

The kind of generativity that reflects interestingness arises relatively spontaneously in people's minds and is manifested in the ease and eagerness, the freedom, with which they imagine variations and transformations of something. Versus the VW/Twitter ad which is not about people freely improvising but mechanically taking data and "generating" one of a limited number of results. I'd say that brands that not only let you generate info, but that you just want to generate info about, are most interesting. (Maybe a better word than "information" here is "theories".)

And thank you very much.

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