Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is the artifact,
Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. It's
Speaker 2: all too common these days to encounter people who choose
Speaker 2: to experience something of the world through the filter of technology.
Speaker 2: Instead of experiencing a rock concert as a pure spectator,
Speaker 2: one might focus on an audio and or visual recording
Speaker 2: of the event that one is making. Various sites and
Speaker 2: destinations become mere background for a selfie or a short
Speaker 2: form online video. And we have probably all caught ourselves
Speaker 2: focusing not on the in the moment experience of a thing,
Speaker 2: but either the media we hope to get out of
Speaker 2: it or and this is key to what we're discussing today,
Speaker 2: a media based understanding of the experience. Now, I want
Speaker 2: to stress that I'm as guilty as anyone in my
Speaker 2: own ways when it comes to this. When I really
Speaker 2: like a piece of art at a museum, I inevitably
Speaker 2: take notes and, if permitted, photograph the work and the
Speaker 2: little information plate so I can refer back to it.
Speaker 2: But I sometimes then have to remind myself to actually
Speaker 2: pause and take in the work, to experience it and
Speaker 2: put aside everything else for a moment, and inevitably sometimes
Speaker 2: I forget to do that. I've also walked ruins and
Speaker 2: imagined myself within a gothic horror film, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: It's easy to think that all of this is a
Speaker 2: product of media technology and to assume that, prior to smartphones,
Speaker 2: cinema and photography, travelers and concert goers simply absorb the
Speaker 2: experience on a more honest, open level. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: probably still a case to be made for that to
Speaker 2: some degree, but claud Glass gives us a little added
Speaker 2: perspective to consider here. I was turned onto this topic
Speaker 2: by Yes, a short form online that my wife sent
Speaker 2: me via the National Gallery London, hosted by Joanna. She
Speaker 2: describes Claude Glass as a nineteen hundred's Instagram filter, and
Speaker 2: that's pretty accurate. Instagram filters, of course, are a popular
Speaker 2: and sometimes controversial innovation of the smartphone age, allowing any
Speaker 2: user to at least roughly apply some semblance of higher
Speaker 2: photographic style and or technique. It's no replacement for actual
Speaker 2: photographic talent and skill, but it generates the semblance and
Speaker 2: experience of the thing. In this the comparison to Claude
Speaker 2: glass is solid. We're talking about a small, folding compact
Speaker 2: that contains not a traditional reflective mirror but a black mirror. Yes,
Speaker 2: much like the ritual obsidian mirrors of the Aztec god
Speaker 2: Tees Catholic PoCA, the horror anthology series on Netflix, and,
Speaker 2: as Joanna points out, the reflective surface of a sleeping
Speaker 2: or de powered iPhone screen. British tourists of the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century would bring claud glass with them on travels, and
Speaker 2: when faced with a particularly evocative landscape, they turned their
Speaker 2: backs on the natural vista and instead gaze at it
Speaker 2: literally through a glass, darkly in the reflection provided by
Speaker 2: their claud glass. The idea here, as Ameliasoff explains in
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty one j Store Daily post titled the
Speaker 2: claud Glass Revolutionized the way people saw landscapes, was that
Speaker 2: reflection in the glass would transform the natural world into quote,
Speaker 2: a vision of painterly charm framed and set apart from
Speaker 2: the rest of the landscape color palette, simplified, bathed in gentle,
Speaker 2: hazy light. Soft points out that some tourists even had
Speaker 2: multiple claud glasses of different shades that, much like Instagram filters,
Speaker 2: allowed the user to play around with the various ways
Speaker 2: that their reality might match up with a more interesting
Speaker 2: bit of media. As the title of Soft's article indicates,
Speaker 2: the idea here is that the craze occurred in the
Speaker 2: wake of a quote sea change in how the British
Speaker 2: thought about landscapes. For hundreds of years, many had long
Speaker 2: derided various British landscapes as being chaotic and uninteresting. Why
Speaker 2: would you want to travel and look at these places?
Speaker 2: But suddenly the popularity of landscape portraits such as those
Speaker 2: by French painter Claude Lorraine, for whom the glass is named,
Speaker 2: changed expectations of the natural world. Note, however, he did
Speaker 2: not invent it, nor even necessarily know of it. Soft
Speaker 2: stresses that the key to all of this is the
Speaker 2: picturesque quality of the ideal landscape painting, and in this
Speaker 2: we mean a perfect balance of the sublime and the beautiful,
Speaker 2: the awesome and even dangerous, with the comforting and the suite.
Speaker 2: In appreciating this in landscape paintings, people began to look
Speaker 2: at landscapes themselves as if they were landscape paintings, and
Speaker 2: when the reality inevitably struggled in comparison to deliberate skilled
Speaker 2: artistic rendition. The claud glass allowed the user to augment
Speaker 2: their perfe, framing it, simplifying its color palette, and casting
Speaker 2: it all in a hazy artistic light that resembles the
Speaker 2: artistic style they craved. Even then, Plenty found the craze
Speaker 2: kind of ridiculous, and poet Thomas Gray wrote in seventeen
Speaker 2: seventy five about falling backwards into a ditch while trying
Speaker 2: to view a landscape through the glass. We cast similar
Speaker 2: judgments about modern technology today, don't we? But what about
Speaker 2: the future? Ai generated images, writings, video music, and now
Speaker 2: even podcasts. AI generated conversations between two non real entities
Speaker 2: are in many ways distorted inhuman reflections via scrape and
Speaker 2: pilfered data. In many cases, that gives us the alternative
Speaker 2: to the real and the genuine, a dark mirror of
Speaker 2: personalized longing. As we back closer and closer towards the ditch,
Speaker 2: tune in for additional episodes of The Artifact, the Monster
Speaker 2: Fact or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can
Speaker 2: email us at contact as Stuffdwlow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
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