I guess this could have just been a shower thought as well…
Because what you see on your screen is new. I bet you if you did some new shit IRL, it would be more impressive than on a screen. Dude, go sky-diving, racing, diving, kayaking, snowboarding, surfing, rock climbing, or play an intense game that physically wears you out. Travel to some place with a great view in the morning to see the sunrise and nice place to see the sunset. Go see the northern lights and tell me that’s mundane.
I love screens too because they let us see different worlds and even the impossible - inside of a star, quantum realms, spaceships, life as ant, other worlds, species, and a bunch of other shit, but if you see it all the time, that’ll be mundane too. I fell asleep to Dune, bro. Blockbusters with special effects send me to sleep because I’ve seen that shit thousands of times. Just got used to it. Probably that’s what happened to you.
Modern people lack an appreciation for the beauty of existence and the physical world. The most intricate and aesthetically pleasing creative achievements of the human race pale in comparison to the inherent beauty of nature.
Artistic expression is inherent to being human. Our creative achievements are part of the beauty of nature. A painting that can make you smile, a story that can make you laugh, a song that can make you cry, that’s all nature, and it is beautiful. If you haven’t found something that speaks to you yet, I hope you’ll keep looking
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate art more than most. But there’s an exclusionary aspect that exists with art, wherein only some people can truly appreciate various aspects.
In contrast, nature is more universal and primal. Everyone, regardless of language or culture or education, can appreciate natural phenomena. The beauty of nature speaks to us on a fundamental level, whereas the beauty of art requires a certain degree of acculturation and intellectual effort to grasp.
Furthermore, human art is a reflection of nature and indeed a part of the beauty of nature, as you say. However, that inevitably positions it as a subset of the all encompassing beauty of existence as a whole. Artistic works are small mirrors reflecting back aspects of reality in interesting ways. But because they can only ever represent fragments of the greater whole, they are somewhat less awe inspiring.
Often, works of art can prompt us to engage with the beauty of reality, so I’m not condemning them in any way. I’m just saying that the representation can’t be better than the real thing, even if humans wish that it were.
Nah, thanks to piracy everyone can watch TV and movies for free. If you’re a poor person who grew up in the city nature is a lot less accessible.
But it’s hard to argue that they could exceed the beauty of the thing that they reflect.
Only if you’re looking for objective value of paint on a canvas, or words on a page. What I think is beautiful about art is the way it makes people feel, and the complexity of the human context that allows that. Just this week, a story caused my fiancée to have a breakthrough in her CPTSD therapy. That’s a unique kind of beauty
Indeed, I agree with you on that.
Nah, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is better than nature.
Is it?
Try about 3 grams of mushrooms and then get back to me.
Because we are on autopilot. We don’t concentrate on what we were born with. It’s a part of us. There is actually a word for it that I can’t remember. You don’t look at everything on your way to work. You just get there and don’t even think about it.
It might partly be that a lot of what is designed for a screen is made deliberately to be maximally appealing to begin with.
For example a film or tv show is shot with various lense that create pleasing depth of field, color and light is carefully controlled. Same with high fidelity video games. Even the UI of your applications is made to be appealing and clean.
Sports are sort of shot like films too, and often the cameras can resolve much higher detail than our eyes alone can. The way a sports event is shot in high def can be like gaining the visual abilites of a hawk or something. The lens can zoom in close while our eyes can only squint.
Novelty is a natural part of human experience. The only way we can exist is if things are not as incredibly mind bending as the first time you see them.
We perceive reality from the moment we open our eyes upon being born. By the time you comprehend what reality is, it’s old hat. This happens to everything, from the first time you see a good movie, to the first time you drive a car on the freeway, eventually everything that we do repeatedly loses its novelty so that the human mind isn’t constantly blown by all the crazy shit going on.
I guess we just didn’t expect to see this kind of realism from a TV screen until it came out, it was a totally new arguably ground-braking thing. Especially with fictional media, which is why James Cameron’s Avatar was so great in 3D (despite being utterly boring IMO).
Think about it, the first HD television broadcasts started in the early 90s in Japan. How exciting that must’ve been. They even got HD movies in the form of Hi-Vision Laserdiscs.
Because that’s comparing oranges to apples.
In terms of pure image quality, real objects would win every time because they only have to be filtered by our eyes - digital images are filtered through the GPU and screen before ever reaching our eyes.
As such, the real contest is the ability of displays to make digital images look comparable to those real objects - because that’s harder to do vs. ust looking at the real life object, it’s more impressive to us.
Well, like, to me, my thing is… a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.
Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.
And I have no reference to it now. I can’t refer back to it. I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.
And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.
- Slacker (1991)
Well, if ye think about it from a perspective of recording things
Most of our ancestors may have been able to look at things as it is, according to their eyes, but they’ve never seen it recorded in photos and videos, let alone in color or good quality, until these relatively recent centuries that we now live in…
It gives a new perspective to the world around us, beyond our eyes, and is probably the closest we’d ever get from literally looking at someone else’s point of view…
Comparison mostly. HD and 3D isn’t impressing you by virtue of it being superior to real life (it isn’t after all), it’s impressing you compared to other examples of the same thing done “worse”. The best portrait artist in the world can not make something look more “real” than the reference material, but it can compared to other attempts at painting.
This is true in other natural things as well. For example, a really big tree surrounded by smaller similar sized trees feels “really impressive” compared to a mountain surrounded by other… similar sized mountains. Or why a particularly colorful plant seems impressive surrounded by a bunch of green and brown plants.
On the other hand, things like OLED screens can be impressive compared to the natural world due to their ability to arrange and display colors rarely found in nature.
Speak for yourself, I think reality is fucking gorgeous. That’s why people try so hard to evoke its appearance in the first place, not only on screen but on canvas and in sculpture and prose.
That’s why my favorite art isn’t realistic at all; if I wanted to see the most beautiful realism around, I could just walk to a lake.
During the third or fourth time I was mad that 3D hadn’t taken off like technicolor, I though “fine! I’ll just look at trees and hallways in real life then!” And yeah, it kinda works.
There’s a lot of beauty in the world if you just, you know, look at it.
In a game, movie, work of literature or theater, your feeling of awe and immersion is maintained by something called the “magic circle”. It is an area of experience that is separated from normal reality by the proverbial 4th wall.
Everything inside the magic circle is filled with artistic purpose, it works (in good works) to drive meaning and communicate themes and ideas of the art work.
Whenever this magic circle is broken, you suspension of disbelief becomes overtaken by cynicism, and the immersion is gone.
Mundane life is full of this cynicism, because we are not conditioned (anymore) to find mundane reality purposeful, outside of really outstanding and dire situations. We take reality with it’s amazing graphics and narrative for granted, not noticing the magic.
Light projection. Others have hit on the psychosocial aspects, but watch a dull projector of the same video as an OLED TV and see how much better the TV is, and how the dim projector is worse than the real world. The simulated brightness and contrast play a big role in the “magical” feeling because our eyes are typically interpreting light via lower-level reflection.
Another way to reproduce this is to look around a big city with lights everywhere at night vs daytime.
