For the first time, since moving here (&since 2018), we went to the movies, and we watched Mickey 17. Not only was the whole going-to-the-movies a first for us here, but we also experienced a type of theater that we've never before experienced (called Titan Lux* or something). After the movie, we went to an actual Korean-food restaurant for the first time here. And then, because we soon realized that we were inadvertently celebrating a Korean-themed First Arbitrary Day of 2025 (&i had acquired two tonics from our jobplace earlier in the week when i snagged some of the drinks provided for the all-hands lunch, etc.), that we should also imbibe my favorite alcoholic beverage of our Seoul Days, and so, onward toward our search for gin we went!
We were out and about at a much later hour than our typical jaunts around the city, and so we ended up not really having an Arbitrary Weekend, cause, like, we're so old now. Nevertheless, I awoke this night thinking about some stuff. And the stuff that I initially thought that I was thinking about has turned out to be something else entirely. I wrote the following and ended up at a different conclusion than I had been aiming. And so, I scrapped the conclusion at which I had arrived, made myself and the bodybuddy/lifemate grilled cheese sandwiches (we trekked to walmart yesterday for the sole purpose of acquiring american cheese and shitty white bread for today, along with our choice of soup) with TNTs (tanqueray is also a first, and like, is expensive alcohol good for you? it tastes so good you'd think it was, lol). And now, I'm tinkering with this shit, rewriting this thing cause a different conclusion emerged.
*sip sip*
건배!
(yes, i'm tipsy, mind the typos ;)
There's a thing you learn about art when you study art history (an absolutely pointless endeavor, imho, especially when considering the overwhelming subjectivity of art-viewing, and the absolute choke hold of the Elitist Gatekeepers on the "industry" [visual, music, film, etc.] etc.).
And the thing is about how the idea of "art" is constantly in a state of flux.
People living in the same era, now, and throughout history, rarely agree on what "art" even is, how to even define it. And "art" is undeniably affected by every advancement in science/technology.
My personal ideology with regards to the relationship between art and science is that both are dependent on each other. Of course, critical, logical, practical minds are necessary in the advancement of science. Creative minds are also critical to the process. Some scientists, I would argue, approach science like artists, and some artists approach their art like scientists. Throughout all of art history, you can see the way that art embraces scientific advancement in various ways. It's almost like the next/new advancement "frees" the sci/tech in current use. Once the "old" sci/tech is "freed," artists utilize the thing in ways for which it was not necessarily intended. I would also argue that artists who utilize a thing in a way beyond its intended-use &or before the thing is declared obsolete, are called "experimental artists."
Art challenges The Idea (of Everything).
Sure, some critical, logical mind may have intended to create this, that, or the other, but the creation, once born, becomes its own thing, and the unintended becomes its definition.
This is the relationship between art&art-making and science, in my opinion, the simplest example of this being the birth of the camera.
Before the camera, if you wanted a representative image or portrait of a thing or person, some other person had to painstakingly paint the thing or portrait. Painting as documentation was not really art; representative &or portrait painting was practical.^^ Yes, of course, there are creative elements to the process found in the symbolism of objects, etc., but generally speaking, painting had become obsolete as a visual way to "realistically" represent the world around us in the new-era of the camera.
But the camera also "freed" painting to be whatever anyone wanted it to be, and we are presented (in art school) with what's considered to be the "new" ideas of what painting could be in the early Impressionist-era art-making of rich, bored white men. And nowadays, everyone can guess which "drip painting" belongs to a very specific white man.
Another simple example is the printing press. The invention and subsequent use of the printing press made manuscript painting obsolete. Human people used to both painstakingly hand-write and hand-paint copies of writings and illustrations. After the printing press, these "artists" (human laborers) were no longer needed, and a new form of "art" emerged in print-making, etchings made out of wood that were then easily reprinted, no different than text. Again, painting in this form wasn't considered art; painting was a skill.
Nowadays, people mostly think of painting as a form of art-making, and it is treated as such. This piece is not about painting, and so, I am going to move on now.
Extrapolate these advancements and their relationship to art and art-making into the NOW.
We see the potential of AI to make human labor obsolete.
If human labor is obsolete, then everything that the human does, theoretically, could be considered art and art-making, or more realistically, content creation.
Extrapolate these advancements and their relationship to art and art-making into the far, far FUTURE, and we arrive at Mickey 17.
For the past few weeks I've been paying attention to the headlines surrounding this movie. As a Korean, I am obviously biased toward Korean film-making, and as the first director to ever win Best Picture for a non-english film at the Oscars, 봉준호 movies are on my radar. We, literally, have not paid to see a movie in theaters since 2018. In 2019, we saw a movie in a theater, but only because someone bought us tickets. Then the happy-covid times trapped us on the Colorado Front Range, and if you know anything about that place, it is probably the number of mass shootings that have occurred in that area of the country, so yea, going to the movies has been out of the question, for me, for quite some time. Also, I don't think that most movies these days need to be experienced in a theater. There are exceptions (and I do wish that I had/could've watched them in a theater), but they are few.
A lot of these headlines described Mickey 17 as an anti-capitalist story &or a scathing portrayal of the current U.S. president, etc., etc., etc. Other headlines struck an almost-surprising tone that this is the type of movie that 봉준호 decided to make after his historic Oscars win, etc., etc., etc. And then I found out, as the credits rolled, that the film is an adaptation of a novel called Mickey 7. I've only seen two other 봉준호 flicks, Parasite, obviously, and The Host. I enjoyed them both, and after only seeing these two movies of his, Mickey 7 didn't surprise me at all as a story that he'd want to bring to life.
I don't know who the author of the original sci-fi premise is; never heard of him, and sadly, I will probably not read the source material. I might, though. I do like, however, that his profile pic on amazon is a partial pic of a white guy, and that that's all I know of him. He gets it.
My point, if I ever actually get to it, is that the 봉준호 movie of the Mickey story is about the obsolescence of humanness. Sure, there are capitalistic elements to the story, and capitalism-as-usual these days is all-bad, and so, any story that depicts capitalism is generally perceived as being anti-capitalist, when sometimes, the story is not about capitalism, because capitalism is simply the water in which the story exists, etc. That's how I view 봉준호's Mickey (cause, as aforementioned, I am unfamiliar with the source material), with regards to its so-called "anti-capitalist" labeling.
The broader question is about consciousness, human consciousness as opposed to the singularity.
If, in the broader context of my extrapolation of science/technology and its obligatory affect on art and art-making, and if we imagine human life and living as the conscious-being "driving" its human body, Mickey 17 wonders what the point of our human life is in the face of an ultimate advancement in technology, that advancement being human cloning.
The Ultimate Advancement:
Not to make intelligent that which is artificial,
but to make artificial that which is intelligent.
Thus, if it is artificial intelligence that is the only type of intelligence that can bring about intelligence, artificially, then the question is not only about the purpose of humanity, but also, it is fundamentally a question about the definition of "human."
Mickey 17 was presumed dead, thus Mickey 18 was printed. The catalyst of the story was the Idea of "Multiples," a dreadful practice, according to the movie, because humans are, intrinsically flawed. The obvious problem of "multiples" is the obvious downside, played out in the movie. The underlying downside, however, is played out in Mickey 17. Mickey 17 understands that he is not Mickey 18. Mickey 18 is his own being. They are clones. They share the same memories, but physical body that inherits these memories—the matrix of their personality—will not necessarily make the same decisions and come to the same conclusions. And this idea is also played out in another sci-fi novel turned screen-fodder, Foundation, but the conclusion is different, cause the purpose of the clones is different.
The difference is power. The clones of Foundation represent the powers that be (puppets though they are). Mickey represents the exploited and powerless. And it is because Mickey is being exploited that we poor normies who make up the 99% can identify with the following conundrum:
If, at some point, we exist in a Mickey-like future of technological advancement, that means that You are the painted portrait, and You 001 is the invention of the camera. Theoretically this ought to "free" You from any sort of practical purpose. Your You-life, theoretically, exists as Art. Any and everything that You do is art and art-making. What does that make of You 01, the practical laborer? Black Mirror touched on this with the egg-episode wherein we watch a woman-character "upload" a copy of herself into her smart-home device. There is a Her, who lives, and a Her 001 who laborers.
Same idea is being played out in Severance, too. *shrug*
But there fundamentally is a difference between these depictions because Mickey hosts a new body. Each Mickey is a whole human, not a split human. Each Mickey is an individual inhabiting its own body. It is the mind/body connection of consciousness that Mickey 17 challenges. The art-like pursuit of challenging the world's ideas is evident, to me, through the existence of both Mickeys at the same time, the technological advancement that makes obsolete its predecessor, making Mickey 17 prime fodder for art and art-making, because Mickey 18 has a job to do.
Unfortunately, I've thought about exactly this nature of consciousness for some time now, and I fall heavily into the camp of Mickey 17. I know that if I "upload" my consciousness, that "person" will not be Me. It will look like me, sound like me, and maybe even behave an awful lot like me, but it will not be me, the me sitting here writing this here piece. I will no longer exist once my organic, physical body exhales its last breath. The Substance (the fact that this movie did not win, in the light of how shitty the "best" movies of 2024 actually were, tells me everything I need to know about the stories that are being valued by our current cultural overlords) made a different point, but the message is the same: You are one.
In the end, be it your own clone or some other-worldly woolly roll, why would any living thing need to be treated as if its life has no purpose?
*when we arrived, there was one ticket-taker and one customer (a pair), and the old asian man, as his old asian wife meandered away, was asking questions as if he'd never even been to the movies before. it was no problem, i have no gripes about things like this when we are early, which is why it is the goal to always arrive early, nevertheless, once the old man had finally done his thing, this was when he noticed us, other people in line behind him, and then he gingerly went on his way. as we approached the ticket-taker, the bodybuddy/lifemate, as he held out a credit card, said, "Hi, I ordered tickets online with this credit card." The ticket-taker took his card, swiped it at her POS station, three small pieces of paper were spit out of the receipt machine, and as she pointed, she said, "Theater 8 is over there." Ten seconds tops. These are the small moments that make me fall in love with my bodybuddy/lifemate over and over again.
^^i am, obviously, not-doing a historical deep dive of art history, at this time, but even the representative images of the Renaissance, i.e. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, etc., is still considered a practical skill. the painters of this time had little to no creative liberty on the subject matter. these paintings are from a time when painting was a skill no different than construction or advertising. an "artist," say Michelangelo, had a "crew" of skilled painters, and then he was hired to create exactly what the patron commissioned, not art. these old works by "masters" are not creative expressions of an artist. they are the culmination of a crew of laborers, exercising a then-valued skill. we call it "art" in the greater context of human creation, but it is not art, in my annoyed opinion; they're ads. it's sorta like if a soda commercial from 2025 was the only surviving "video" of some future apocalypse, and the aliens that find this planet in the future uphold the ad as a representation of our art, etc.
