Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly but art can not be flattened

Why the iPad is so Stylish, It’s So Small, And What Happens When It Gets Done: The Story of a Girl Who Lives Inside Apple

New versions of Apple’s devices don’t change anything in a meaningful way and are suggested to be obsolete by the company. The point of this ad is not about the iPad’s creative uses — it’s that it’s skinny. The skinniest ever is the selling point. Apple was so focused on its exciting new marketing feature that it lost sight of what’s really important: the tools that make the things we love.

In this ad, technology is disposable. I flinched when that piano got crushed. A lot of people had to sign off on this ad, since no one inside the company did. To immediately improve the ad, you simply need to reversed the ad, which was done by Iran’s Reza Sixo Safai. After all, the iPad can also be a creative tool, and isn’t that what the commercial was meant to suggest?

The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything that’s a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab.

That view of technology is fundamentally disrespectful. There is stuff that is meant to last. Technology is hopeful in many ways. Our past and our future are intertwined with a golden thread.

Language is our most basic technology and allows us to build everything else. Writing down our thoughts meant we could begin to access lifetimes of experience. The Pythagorean theorem was so significant when it was first discovered that a cult formed around it; I learned it in sixth grade because it was foundational for a lot of things we created later. These foundations — language, math — made possible a chain of events that allowed Apple to exist.

There’s still a place for the technology Apple crushes in its ad. A TV screen is larger and more enjoyable to use than an iPad if you don’t need to be on the move; that’s why most people still own one. A record player is a way to get in touch with old friends at record stores. The arcade video game exists in places where you gather with other people.

The iPad doesn’t replace some of the experiences. At its best, it works well with them. I have never met a professional carpenter who uses only a multi-tool to get their job done. But if you’re trying to travel light, that Swiss Army knife is probably better than an entire toolkit.

What’s Making Us Happy? Why art can’t be flattened, not because it is ugly and crushing – a piece by NPR

The piece was in NPR’s Happy Hour newsletter. Get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy when you sign up for the newsletter.

“I’m not worried” is the last thing on your mind before a monster devours you. But while I am worried about the economics of art and its creation, I am not worried at all that art made by humans will ever vanish or be replaced by the thinnest iPad ever. The gasp that went up from so many people when they saw that guitar explode, that sound came from the part of a human being that makes art. And that part instinctively understands that beauty isn’t fixated on tech-world dominance. It doesn’t demand to crush what is loved in order to chase the fantasy that you can fit everything that matters into the pocket of a briefcase.

Source: Yes, Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened

The hideous part of music: The iPod’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened

There is something hideous about crushing an acoustic guitar. It explodes in splinters when you make it Buckle. It’s personal to me, because I was a kid with a dad who used to entertain us with songs like “Dark as a dungeon”, a folk song about the dangers of coal mining. Maybe it’s not the guitar. Maybe it’s the cameras or the vinyl records.

These are not practical items to start with. Nobody owns a piano because it’s practical; it’s about the least practical thing you can own. It can wreck your floor. It goes out of tune. And if you happen to get a new place, you don’t just need movers for it; you may need special movers. You can’t use a piano to get from point A to point B in the most direct way. You own a piano for the reason we had one in my house: a person plays it. Someone sits down, as my mother did, and plays the “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals lightly squeak, and you can watch hands skitter across keys, and of course you are listening to music — but also, those are your mother’s hands.

Source: Yes, Apple’s new iPad ad is ugly and crushing, but art can’t be flattened

Artis et Machines : La reimagination en r’essource d’art

The ad plays on the idea that artificial intelligence can take over the production of art, such as books, illustrations, Music, and films. Everyone has been attacked on the need for their own individuality to be involved in the creation of art. It is an attempt to reduce creative acts to devices with the right capabilities, to the point where machines can make it all entirely without us. We will, in this vision, order a book or a film as we do a mass-produced piece of fast fashion, and as such, it will be cheap and disposable and reliant on the exploitation of labor.