Todd Rundgren's Talking Heads
Todd Rundgren is currently on a virtual tour of 25 cities. All live performances take place in Chicago but they are time-shifted and place-shifted accordingly. They are what we used to call "pre-recorded" pre-internet, and have some elements of public-access TV circa 2000.
I recall in the late 90s the dream was that the internet would become more like TV and/or film. (Remember the elaborate Flash "Intro" pages that were like film title sequences?) It was possible to embed very small 320x240 clips and animated GIFs in 1998 but were severely constrained by slow modem speeds. But even in the early 90s--and probably since the first TVs were in living rooms--we wanted to interact with the screen. Bowie's TVC15 always comes to mind: The lyric is loosely based on Iggy Pop's acid trip where he envisioned that the TV swallowed his girlfriend. It's actually now true; Screens consume (or devour) our attention. During the Fluxus movement, Joseph Beuys used TVs as a part of his performances, and obviously Andy Warhol. Even photographers would photograph TVs as a kind of portrait or still life. The TV might have been off, but it still had a presence in the room.
Even before then, when artists started experimenting with computer art in the late 1980s, people were more interested in the computers than they were in the art that was made on them. This was perhaps the very first stirrings of the widely generative nature of what a personal computer could do. People were making art with them but people probably had other ideas. Todd Rundgren has always been in that space, and I must say, I also have been. As I've said before, music will always be joined at the hip with technology because it does what any technology does: extend. Most of the musicians I know usually converge with technology fairly readily because, since the advent of guitar amps and other gear, we've always had to incorporate them, and became another extension of our enthusiasm. Therefore, it's not a stretch from playing synthesizers and playing with computers. In fact, since recording started using computers in the mid-1980s, musicians were at the ready--and still are.
Telematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ascott
In the early 1990s, artist Roy Ascott (whose proteges include Brian Eno and Pete Townshend) wrote a prescient series of essays on the future of cognition in the visual arts. He coined the words telematic, telenoia, datapools, data sea, among others:
"And just around the corner, not playing peek-a-boo but close to doing so, is the artificial observer, the eye of the neural net, the artificial intelligence that will surely become a part of the observing system. But that's the future." See: Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness
Ascott, Roy. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. United Kingdom, University of California Press, 2007.
Talking Head Phases
Technologies can take perhaps decades to mature and hand in a talking head phase while we incubate the possibilities. To really see how clunky new technologies are, you have to revisit the world when you were 7 years old, then compare them in regular 7-year intervals. In many ways, Ray Kurzweil is correct to assume that the change will be predictably constant, such that at one point we will reach the "Singularity", which I think he has predicted to be in 2030, perhaps sooner if there are inflection points.
Usually what happens is that someone finds another use for something at a small level, and then it takes off--we hope in a socially responsible way. It puts technology in its place, separate from our heads and not inside them, forcing us to refer to ourselves as "netheads" which means someone that has not externalized technology as a tool, and is perhaps has broken the "machine-brain barrier". The takeaway is that we keep things behind "translucent" barriers as much as possible, or ahead of the event horizon. Nanotechnology is an example of something below the threshold of perception and may be already insidiously implanted in us. By the same token, if this has in fact happened, and they have already breached the blood-brain barrier, embrace the nano in beneficial ways as a tool, what Ascott called "telematic embrace", or "moistmedia".
Other media-band anthropomorphizations where the device is used as a head, eventually obviated (or made less obvious) once vision involves direct projection on your retina. Our media technologies eventually become a part of the head. In some sense, this is a part of the Singularity but has been happening all along.
The fact that a funky art-school band used that as their name is a part of this "implantation" process. The conjured image of radio-head is literally sur-real--above reality.
Technology is now over-associated with computers and the Internet, and we are becoming that interpretation of technology.
Radiohead
TVhead (MTV)
Nethead
Bothead
(Metaphors are powerful "drugs")
Takeways:
Todd Rundgren uses the technology responsibly by placing the music at the top-level--as it should be-- as opposed to focusing on the technology and never having any truly transcendent emotional experience.
Inflection points are the engines of technological adaptation. Todd: “I had already been thinking about other ways to deliver my product...and then the pandemic happened and that kind of made everybody else think that possibly a different way of doing this might be good to have for a backup plan." https://www.ocregister.com/2021/03/05/todd-rundgren-predicts-virtual-concert-tour-will-be-the-new-normal/
Temporary adaptations can become new norms.
The PC is essentially a camera (room) in itself. Some people used to film concerts on 8mm, videotape, etc. and now since the whole experience is virtualized (even yourself), it is easier to memorialize.
Rather than rail against technology, find out what it can do and use it for things other than what was intended. The main effect of this is that it allows us to use TV or social media by using it as a character in itself.
The only thing preventing old ideas and dreams from being implemented are from physics and systems theory: heat, friction, latency. Fiber-optic broadband will solve some of those problems.