Space Oddity: A case for art over technology

Poorva Paksha

About a decade ago, a Canadian astronaut recorded a music video of himself singing David Bowie’s 1969 Space Oddity while literally at zero gravity aboard the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth. ‘This is Major Tom to Ground Control…/ And I’m floating in a most peculiar way/ And the stars look very different today/ For here, am I sitting in a tin can/ Far above the world’.

The video was a worldwide sensation with hundreds of millions of views. The Smithsonian has preserved it, styling it the International Space Station’s most iconic moment ever. David Bowie himself surmised that the astronaut’s rendition was ‘the most poignant version of the song ever created’. I disagree. I think we are looking at this backwards. For, what is truly extraordinary is not the actual execution of the space-faring practitioner, but rather the boundless imagination of the land-locked artist.

I’d go so far as to say that there was even something feeble and mundane about miraculously reaching the liminal point of space and opting to express your feelings about it with a song written four decades earlier in a London garret. It’s an implicit acquiescence of the inherent superiority of art over technology.

This position is not merely contrarian, it’s borderline ridiculous, given the emergence of Artificial Intelligence – a technology that stands to make human imagination redundant. Perhaps even humans themselves. We can expect that AI will eventually take away all of our jobs. The increasing automation of tasks and processes through AI will inevitably lead to massive job losses and economic disruption, particularly for certain industries and workforce demographics. Right now, those who work with their hands are safe: robotics is not yet as advanced as AI, meaning that there is not yet a suitable artificial body to house the artificial mind. However, anyone who works behind a computer is already at risk today. A person working on a computer is obviously redundant, when a computer can itself just do that same kind of computer-work on its own.

It’s rather ironic, after we’ve all been pushed so hard at school and university, that unskilled labour now has much better chances to prevent its redundancy than skilled labour does. But this gap will close in the future, once robotics advances. The superior cognitive and physical capabilities of AI systems could result in the widespread displacement of humans across all domains, including intellectual, creative, and physical tasks. ‘Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles/ I’m feeling very still/ And I think my spaceship knows which way to go’.

Yes, the spaceship knows which way to go. It doesn’t need Major Tom. But let’s get back to the other lyric, ‘and the stars look very different today’. If you want different-looking stars, you can hardly do better than Van Gogh’s post-Impressionist masterpiece, The Starry Night (1889), one of the world’s most famous and recognisable paintings. It’s a gorgeous and moving work of art, but with its swirling brushwork and thick ripples of paint, it’s not like the stars that Major Tom saw – either from above or from below. It’s not realistic at all.

Only a generation earlier, from around the 1840s to 1870s, Realism dominated European art. Painters aspired to capture the world as it actually was and represent it in their artworks. Brushwork was concealed, and art sought painstakingly to be a mirror of nature. Have you ever asked yourself how we went so abruptly from the era of art as seamless representation to art as globby impression, the Impressionism of Monet’s Water Lilies, for example?

It was because of technology. A technology that risked making every painter redundant: the camera and its photograph. There was no longer any point for a painter to try to represent the outside world when the camera could do it cheaper, faster and more accurately. The new technology forced painters to innovate, to represent the inner world – impressions, expression – to which cameras had no access. Thus emerged post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Art Deco, Pop Art…painting has never looked back after that heroic inventiveness in the face of the threat of obsolescence.

‘Here am I floating ‘round my tin can/ Far above the moon/ Planet Earth is blue/ And there’s nothing I can do’. Not correct! There is something we can do. Art, boundless human imagination, triumphed over the technology that threatened to overshadow it in the 19th century. AI, the technology of the 21st century, is of course altogether more powerful and uniquely threatening. But it is not entirely unprecedented and insurmountable. We just need to think of a new way to cut off our left ears.