Eddie Van Halen & Les Dawson; warriors against A.I.
I've spent most of this last year teaching Graphic Communication at #cardiffmet, and along with keeping up my freelance work and childcare, there's been little time for personal interests, so now the summer's here, I'm getting time to pick up my guitar again.
Eddie Van Halen (hereafter: EVH) is my favourite guitarist. I was a teen of the 80's, and discovered him alongside Guns 'n' Roses, Iron Maiden and Metallica (although of course, Van Halen pre-dates all of those).
It's a crass simplification, but for me, EVH represents the third act in a radical evolution in guitar playing - started by Jimi's Page and Hendrix - the former with his aggressive acceleration of traditional blues, the latter with his experimental deconstruction of it. The vast majority of post-punk, rock and metal guitarists draw on techniques that EVH pioneered, and his shift away from traditional blues/ rock compositions to his trademark effervescent, swaggering melodies laid a path for countless bands through the 80s and 90s.
When I'm teaching, I tend to relate big concepts through topics that I'm passionate about, so it was inevitable that EVH would crop up at some point during lectures. I'll circle back to him in a moment.
Over the last few years, I've started to feel that "design skill" has come to be synonymous with decorative accuracy, rather than conceptual creativity. Many students flock to Pinterest for their inspiration, and spend FAR too long fretting over minute font variations or Pantone swatches. The storytelling evaporates, and along with it, the injection of that story into the visual language of their design. A.I. has demonstrated that decorative perfection might no longer be a selling point in terms of skill, so creatives are navigating a treacherous landscape.
Part of my lecturing duties this year was to deliver a module in the Concept section of the Art and Design degree course, which deals with wider ideas beyond students chosen disciplines. This year, I prepared a course specifically to encourage the students to expand their overall knowledge, explore the links between disparate topics, and experiment with symbolism, allegory and metaphor.
The module (called Bandwidth, unsurprisingly), is a disparate mix of science, art, history, psychology, media and advertising. Each brief topic/ story serves as an analogy of metaphor for something else, and each story connects - either to a subsequent, seemingly disconnected story, or to a larger concept. The history of the Titanic illustrates the importance of being alive to the Zeitgeist of your time, through the story of the novel "Futility" - an almost exact telling of the Titanic disaster, written nearly 20 years before the ship was even built. The extinction of the Mammoth illustrates the danger of Pinterest/ A.I. through it's recycling of DNA. Karl Jung, Tarot, and symbolism are explained using my favourite "way more complex than it looks" film - Ice Age.
The students also undertake practical tasks - one of this years highlights was a playable board game based around randomly picked topics - Top of the Pops and the Electric Brae (a geographical optical illusion in Scotland).
Which brings us back to EVH...
I asked the students to watch 2 videos. One was produced by Guitar World magazine, documenting Fender's eye-wateringly expensive replica of EVH's "Frankenstrat" guitar (it's the one in the photo at the top of this article). It's a legend within the guitar world, built from scrap parts and modified to suit one purpose - delivering EVH's musical vision.
Eddie Van Halen bent musical rules to achieve an end goal. I won't go into the details - I'll leave a link to the videos instead. In many ways the adage "You must know the rules in order to break them" didn't apply, because EVH was working purely with an end goal in mind, and creating structures as he went along.
The second video was a short documentary about comedian and musician Les Dawson; specifically about his trademark "bad" piano playing.
The video gives a great insight into someone who really DID know the rules, and also how, and when to break them. Dawson didn't drop his bum notes in at random. He carefully chose the points in the music where the audience would either be expecting, or NOT expecting a dropped note, and his knowledge of his instrument and his material allowed him to play with his audience's expectations.
The purpose of showing these videos was to get my students thinking about how broader knowledge or intent drives our creative output. EVH's guitar is almost Bauhaus in it's design - the visual language and coherence come mainly from functional modifications, but it's a thing of visceral, chaotic beauty, that reflected (and fed into) his playing.
Dawson's piano massacres are carefully constructed and timed to illicit a response from an aware audience. It's almost memetic, and certainly aligns with advertising/ packaging design.
A.I. generated design threatens to achieve decorative polish more easily and more cost effectively than a human designer can. What A.I. can't do is anticipate or empathise, which means it can't respond to a brief in a way that is satirical, sarcastic or self aware. A.I. can't play with the expectations of an audience. It can't infer, or symbolise, so can't generate a visual language that resonates with a narrative except on the most basic of terms.
Humans can. Human Intelligence is messy and illogical. It's a Frankenstrat of hasty fixes, responding to the very human blend of functional and emotional requirements. It's also often thoughtful and targeted, like Dawson's piano playing.
The purpose of my Bandwidth module is to get my students thinking in those paradoxical ways - chaotic, targeted, symbolic, visceral, and applying that to their work. This is a learnable skill, but only with a broad bandwidth of knowledge and interests, which is what lies at the heart of the course.
If my students rely on Pinterest for inspiration, then they become inward looking, much like an A.I. - recycling ideas into homogenous decoration.
I'm currently adapting the module for use beyond a college environment, so welcome your commentary. In the meantime, I need to go practice my guitar some more. There's plenty of Dawsonesque bum notes, but none of them are intended...
Video links:
EVH pt1: https://youtu.be/i2mh7zGfFRM
EVH pt2: https://youtu.be/ICXeYawQqFs
EVH pt3: https://youtu.be/O9_ZDxoxhoc
Les Dawson: https://youtu.be/4shkC62BPTY