I Can Almost Taste The Color Of That Song

I was walking back from the store this morning thinking about the hypothetical Fourth Industrial Revolution and paradigm shift and I got lost in my own fucking neighborhood. When I realized I was lost, it took me a few minutes to become ‘unlost’. I did this by listening for distant traffic patterns and then triangulating my position. Then, I got lost again.

Patterns. There was something there that got me lost that second time. I thought about specialization. I wrote about it in Tattoo Machine, and I think about it off and on to this day. Economics is one of the driving forces in human specialization. There are people who make their living, sometimes for their entire lives, doing one very, very small thing that is part of something far, far larger. Take a person who works in a capacitor assembly plant. Those capacitors will find their way into any number of things. Specialization is where everyone is increasingly making one tiny piece of a vast puzzle, over and over, without ever gaining a comprehensive view of the Big Picture.

At least that’s one way to look at it. Economics is also responsible for laying the foundation of what may be the paradigm shift that will drive elements of a shift in the arts that might coincide with the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. That foundation is (drum roll) multi-specialization. I have an interesting case study for it conveniently located inside me. A film producer or two hypothesized that a guy (me) who had a background in music, a 30 year career as a visual artist, and solid book reviews might have the ingredients of a director. More, those ingredients had been fired in separate kilns, as it were, so the results could well be interesting.

That may or may not be true, but it got me thinking about that elusive ‘Big Picture’ I’m always wondering about. I know many musicians, and almost all of them are multi-specialists. They are driven to be because of our current revolution, the digital one. Pandora, etc. They don’t make shit off music anymore, but they still do it. It pays half the bills, so they also do something else. Some of them are visual artists. Some are chefs. You get the picture. The point is that a great many ‘creatives’ (what a stupid word) are multi-disciplinary professionals nowadays. That number is growing. And growing. And growing.

 

par·a·digm shift

noun

a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.

 

Fourth Industrial Revolution (Wikipedia)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution builds on the Digital Revolution, representing new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies and even the human body.[10] The Fourth Industrial Revolution is marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, computing, biotechnology, The Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing and autonomous vehicles.

Well I’ll be. Look at the fields in that revolution. Each has in its design ancestry the constituent components of an encyclopedia of other fields. So I wonder… What if the economic pressure that drove multi-specialization in the arts is similar. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the cusp of something grand because of it. Everything is linked in the puzzle of The Big Picture. Is it possible that right alongside the above revolution we’ll see an explosion of new forms of creativity? Arts that don’t yet have a name?

That’s why I got lost the second time. Happy Holidays!