In recent years, a current has emerged against the purification process resulting from audio/video digitisation. It is an argument that music and film enthusiasts are familiar with, and it has much more complex roots than meets the eye.
Framing the context
It was Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony that was the first audio-CD to be marketed and was produced by Philips. The CD revolutionised not only the audio sector but also the video sector, making it possible to break down the space limitations of vinyls and cassettes, thanks also to the integration of increasingly high-performance and flawless audio encodings. Those who lived through the advent of CDs will remember the concept of ‘crystal-clear sound’ that some manufacturers extolled. No distortions, no croaking, no imperfections: just beautiful, clear and perfect music (and later films). Yet vinyls never disappeared, they seemed doomed to extinction, but an article by Matteo Runchi entitled ‘What’s Behind the Return of Vinyl’, reports an interesting fact.
Vinyl sells more than CDs and in the US it grows by 21.7% in the first part of 2023.
Vinyl is not perfect, vinyl is absolutely full of small and big flaws: among all, the underlying impurity of the sound. That impurity that has been called ‘imperfection’ and has been ‘taken off the market’ for years.
In an interview with Quentin Tarantino on the use of digital in cinema, we learn that the director mostly rejects digital because it is ‘too pure’ and all those details can create a distraction for the viewer. Tarantino explains that, for example, in the digital restoration of the film ‘Rio Bravo’ with John Wayne, microscopic details were added to the backdrops that were not visible on film. The point is that those details were not necessary and seeing them in the restoration distracts the viewer from the scene.
The search for authenticity
What is authentic? This is a legitimate question that requires a non-legal definition. The dictionary provides a precise definition such as ‘that which is true, i.e. not false, not falsified‘. In the philosophical sphere, for existentialist philosophers authenticity is‘life lived in awareness of one’s vocation‘ (Treccani). In short, authenticity requires truthfulness and self-awareness: characteristics with which artificial intelligence is not endowed. It does not generate, reproduce or‘compute‘ as Han correctly claims. Authenticity is therefore in the imperfection that accompanies the work and, in its complexity, is capable of making it perfect and eternal in time like many works of art.
What imperfection represents
Imperfection represents man. The history of man, as Bill Bryson wonderfully explains in‘A Brief History of Life‘, is a compendium of trials and errors. Of miserable (and sometimes absurd) failures, followed by courageous attempts to improve man’s condition; imperfection is man, it is part of his life and distinguishes him. If perfection is to be part of an operating process, a critical system, a high-precision machine, it need not be present and permeate every aspect of human life. Man lives in the imperfection of complex systems (think of the legal system), thanks to which he has managed to create a complex world of global relations that unites billions of people. In this sense, the clearest contribution was made by Anna Magnani with regard to her growing old.
Leave me all the wrinkles, don’t take any of them off. I paid dearly for them all. It took me forever to get them! […] You take a lifetime to like yourself, and then you get to the end and realise that you like yourself. That you like yourself because you are you, and because it took you a lifetime to like yourself: yours. It takes you a lifetime to realise that those who should have liked you, did like you… And those who didn’t, better that way. It takes you a lifetime to count your flaws and laugh about them, because they are beautiful, because they are yours. Because without all those flaws, who would you be? No one.
Imperfection, then, is a testimony to human being and action and as such must be preserved and ‘pointed out’.
Imperfection in the digital age
The perfect scenario to present in pictures. The text is full of meaning, with high-sounding words and steeped in subordinates. Artificial intelligence can guarantee results purged of uncertainties, smears, inaccuracies, but also incredibly empty of meaning. In a well-written newspaper article, it is almost never the news that moves or excites the person, but the way it is written. The words are often altered, they are ‘intimate’ and ‘personal’, they are a signature of the mind that gave birth to them and that is making a pact with the reader‘I tell you and you read‘.
The extreme quest for perfection in every area of the individual’s private and professional sphere is not only senseless but also de-humanising. So, perhaps more than the elimination of‘noise‘, it is necessary to learn how to manage it, to explain it, to mitigate it when it is dangerous, to exalt it when it is the source of human ingenuity. Yet there is one sentence by Severino that deserves special attention and it is contained in a small volume:
Beauty is a condition for arriving at the Good. The beautiful is harmonious, the ugly is disharmonious, beauty can be understood as the place where the good manifests itself.
Source: E. Severino, “Del Bello”, Mimesis, 2011, Pg.10
The harmony Severino speaks of, what is it? Is it that perfection computed by artificial intelligence? Is harmony the imperfection of the human body? Or does harmony mean the extreme precision of the digital stroke made by the rendering of a computerised image? The canon of beauty was undoubtedly set by Polyclitus, the Greek sculptor born in Argos who lived in the 5th century BC. According to Polyclitus:
Beauty (to kallos) stems from symmetry, that is, the possibility of con-measuring (syn-metrein) different extensions. The symmetry investigated and pursued by Polyclitus concerns – the physician Galen tells us – that “of a finger with respect to another finger, of all the fingers with respect to the carpus and metacarpus, of the latter with respect to the forearm, of the forearm with respect to the arm, and, in short, of all the parts with respect to each other
Source: Treccani, ‘Polyclitus and the Measure of Beauty’.
It is therefore not the perfection of the realisation but the overall symmetrical relationship of all the parts that leads to the conclusion that beauty is potentially present in every human form as long as it responds to a canon of proportionality and symmetry. But the Greeks themselves extended the characteristic of beauty and harmony to athletes, who were considered superior to normal human beings, not only in terms of physical features but also in terms of behavioural, moral and ethical characteristics that made them a social reference point.
Conclusion
The exhausting pursuit of perfection desired by human beings through technique is only partly justified while, for the most part, it is indicative of a transient result of unexpected and brief wonderment that then gives way to a kind of ‘boredom’. Just as in a piece of classical music one seeks the interpretation of the master, in other parts the emphasis is on authenticity, which does not require perfection, but rather self-awareness and humanity.
