The orchard behind the house is is thick with hoar frost, glorious in the winter sun. Despite the sharpness of the imagery in this video capture, what I experience is not what the camera records, good though it is. Tiny irregularities on the surface of the human eye make the crystals of ice appear to glitter and flash as I move through the garden. It's utterly beautiful.
Think back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Whenever a screen goddess appeared in rhinestones or sequins, her image would simply be off the charts with the reflective sheens and sparks given off by them, because the lenses back then were a lot closer to the imperfections found in the human eye, and those imperfections created the starbursts of dazzle which created the magic.
Watch any film or tv commercial today and glitter has been added in post-production, and frankly looks like it. Instagrammers add sparkles to their selfies, staring in soft-focus through storms of 'glitter' added with an app. All those old Christmas cards embellished with frosting glitter spoke to us because they looked the way we saw frost and snow with our own eyes. It glittered. These days the Etsy merchants selling vintage Christmas cards 'with glitter, can't reproduce them effectively to show at their online stores. Their cameras can't capture the glitter. Everything flattens out, the glitter:glimmer/sparkle vanquished.
I recognise digital sparkle the moment it appears. It isn't remotely similar to what we see with our own eyes. It isn't even what cameras from an earlier age captured. I know it isn't real, just as surely as I know when confronted with a CGI dinosaur, no matter the artistry involved in its making, that it isn't real. It makes me feel differently about what I'm watching, certainly on a conscious level, but almost more so on an unconscious level. I'm just not as engaged/involved. In the first Jurassic Park film the stand-out scene for me was not created as CGI. It was the scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen, which was filmed with brilliant puppets.
All this is to come to the elephant in the room, which is the AI generated imagery now flooding Instagram. So much of its candy-coloured allure and textural brilliance is leaving many illustrators, painters and stage and production designers feeling that their long-honed drawing and painting skills are going to become obsolete. How, they wonder, can anyone compete with an AI's capacity to take/steal existing materials and reassemble and embellish them to such clever effect. How can any artist with pencils and brushes compete at anything like the speed. While I don't believe there will be any turning from the technology, I don't believe it's game set and match. Just as CGI continues to co-exist with analogue skills, so there will be things at which people still do better than a computer programme. After all, old-style glitter is still defeating the apps.
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