“A deep ocean of secrets…”
Iceberg photographed from SS Etonian in location of Titanic collision on April 12th 1912.
Today marks the 112th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.
Last week, on the last day of the Easter hols, I sort of pushed my kids into watching the movie with me when we chanced upon it on Film4.
They made a sterling effort, but started getting upset once the panic set in on deck – Tommy gets shot, Cpt Smith locks himself in the wheelhouse, band stay on for one last encore. I let them ride it out, but I’ll admit that I stood in front of the screen when Jeanette Goldstein reads her kids Tir Na Nog in their cabin as the water rises. We didn’t fancy that one coming back to bite us in the wee small hours.
I feel a touch guilty because I’m a massive Titanic nerd, and I wanted them to catch the bug. I’ve been fascinated by the Titanic story since I was a teenager – I walked into our living room one Sunday afternoon while my parents were watching ‘A Night to Remember’ (the 1958 film of Walter Lord’s book), flopped down and said “What’s this cr*p?” My dad (a man of few, but usually sage, words), said “shut up and sit down, you might learn something”. I did, I did, and I did.
As usual, I try to relate everything back to design, and I’ll come to that presently.
A huge part of Titanic’s enduring power is that it sits as a nexus of so many narratives beyond the sinking of the ship.
As well as the seismic changes to maritime regulations that occurred after the sinking (including the formation of what would become the US Coast Guard), the loss of the Titanic fractured social and political assumptions. The loss of wealthy passengers and their belongings resulted in cargo insurance claims totalling $9.42 million – nearly 2 million dollars more than the ship has cost to build.
JJ Astor, the richest passenger on the ship, was also one of the richest people in the world at that time, with a net worth of around $87 million ($2.75 billion today).
The loss of seemingly untouchable celebrities on a seemingly unsinkable ship demolished the solid convictions that “man” had conquered the natural world through technology, innovation and sheer power of will.
Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Convergence of the Twain’ speaks at once of determined and unknown fate – of an iceberg that is formed in considered celestial response to “man’s” arrogance, yet is disconnected and blind to the technological innovation afoot. Both these concepts fly in the face of late Edwardian “man” centred view of the world.
“Enough Said” by Clark MacAdams pounced on the opportunity to show the rising Suffragette movement as hypocritical – a demand for independence and equality that crumbled in the face of peril; “Votes for women; Boats for women”. It’s interesting to read the juxtaposing stories of Molly Brown, who manned an oar in her lifeboat and campaigned for the boat to return for more survivors, and Bruce Ismay (then chairman of White Star), who boarded a lifeboat and was later vilified by British and US press for cowardice.
The unofficial principle of ‘women and children first’ was only 60 years old at this point. It arose because of the sinking of the Birkenhead, which struck rocks off the coast of South Africa in 1852. The boat was filled with soldiers and their families, and orders were given for the soldiers to remain fast on deck, so that the women and children could evacuate. It was felt that soldiers diving into the sea might upset the lifeboats and incur frenzy in the shark filled waters. 445 of 638 people on board perished, but all the women and children were saved. King Frederick William of Prussia had the story read aloud to every regiment in his army, as an example of supreme courage and sacrifice.
Amid the maelstrom of accusatory rhetoric sits an unusual piece of fiction. It’s a novella called ‘Futility’, written by Morgan Robertson. The plot deals with an enormous passenger liner called the Titan, that strikes an iceberg on its maiden voyage, resulting in the loss of most of the passengers due to a lack of lifeboats.
It’s a predictable piece of schlock literature that capitalises on the Titanic story – except that the novella was written in 1898, a full 14 years before the Titanic set sail. The similarities between the Titan and the Titanic are numerous – from the size and safety gear of the ship to the manner in which it struck the berg.
I promised that there would be some connection to creative practice in here, and it’s this novella that sparks it.
Robertson had neither a DeLorean, nor precognitive powers. His seemingly prescient novel merely drew on social zeitgeist and maritime knowledge (he had spent much of his youth at sea). At the turn of the 20th century, ocean travel companies leveraged speed, luxury and technology to attract passengers, leaving safety regulations struggling to catch up. The arrogant belief in technology as a dominant force had strengthened its roots since the Industrial Revolution and the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Robertson absorbed these varied influences – either consciously or subconsciously (probably a mix of both), and his creative writing found the natural extrapolation of them.
I see a worrying trend in students to look inward only – to fire up Pinterest (or more lately, Stable Diffusion) as a singular source of inspiration. Pinterest is fine if you’re looking for specific visual reference, but it’s a slippery slope for conceptual and ideation.
We are in a new Industrial revolution of sorts – digital tools and processes, and of course AI, are believed to be undermining the craft of the artist and designer, but I feel this is partly an illusion.
Creativity is an iceberg – the tip grabs everyone’s attention, but it’s just the public face of a larger, more impactful mass of symbolic narrative.
If the creative process is an iceberg, then AI generated art/ design is sheet ice. It’s low and flat, so easy to climb aboard; but it’s unstable because it has no mass to underpin it. If modern society is the Titanic – ambitious, self-serving, and beset with inertia, then it is only the sub-waterline bulk of design narrative that can arrest it. If the Titanic had struck sheet ice, it would have been inconvenienced at worst.
Like Robertsons novel, the final outcome of a creative process should be driven by the ideas that lie underneath. Those ideas are more powerful when they tap into a subconscious zeitgeist, and that ability only comes through embracing a wide gamut of inspirations and knowledge beyond ‘design decoration’. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ‘Futility’ was written about a ship, a plane, or a sandwich shop. What matters is that it grew from, and reflected, something large and important.
I’m coming to feel that the hardest job in the creative world right now is not directly competing with the output of AI generated art, it’s reminding, or enlightening our audience of clients and public that the core of good design – narrative, symbolism, resonance, happens under the waterline, and that without that mass and balance, decorative design, no matter how slick, doesn’t have the power to change anything at all.