Artistic Handoffs 🤝

🎵 The song for this post is vampire, by Olivia Rodrigo. 🎵

Asking questions like "what makes art special?" or "how does art teach us to be human?" is a great way to get frustrated and bother your friends—like Haddaway's question ("What is Love?"), it's deeply interesting, maybe important, but impossible to make headway on.

Fertile for this kind of question is what I call artistic handoffs; when a work goes between multiple people, like passing a baton. The craft implications are always interesting, and they're also somewhat inevitable: adding more humans (and therefore, handoffs) is a prerequisite to making art of a certain scale. No single person, no matter how industrious, can create the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones.

I'll go over a bunch of types of handoffs, with some favorite examples. For each, I'll end with chewy questions they generate, which I feel approach The Big Questions like "what makes art special" and what it teaches us to be human. Later I'll take a hard left and this essay will either die or make A Very Important Point.

Presenting: The Handoffs!

Translations

This handoff inspired the blogpost: after reading The Vegetarian by a Korean author, I saw some drama around its translation, and wondering how my experience of the book was informed by its translation.

When I read Crime and Punishment in high school, the back jacket said

this is Jessie Coulson's translation, which has never been bettered.

And that's a fun, bold claim! Here's a list of 8 Crime & Punishment translations, with excerpts, starting from 1885 and most recent one in 2022. Suppose you made it a project to read all the translations. What would come into relief? What kind of conversation would you enjoy most with someone who only read a single one? A bit like the "Chinese room" experiment, do you think you could write a version of Crime & Punishment from the copies of 8 translations (and still call it Crime & Punishment), without learning Russian?

Consider your favorite book, and imagine it was translated into a language you didn't speak. What would the translator have to do to make you hate the translation? What would they have to do to make you think it was great?

Adaptations

Consider cross-media adaptations; here are a few:

• The short story When the Yogurt Took Over, which was made into an animation in Netflix's Love Death & Robots. I know a few people for whom this was their favorite Love Death & Robots sketch; meanwhile, it originated as a casual riff, a throwaway joke from a blog post.

• The novel Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer, made into a full-length movie, which takes big liberties.

• The comic Lucifer, adapted into a police procedural TV show.

What responsibilities does an adaptation owe to its source? While I loved the TV show Lucifer, it's really silly, and never read the comic. Friends who've read the comic have gotten whippingly angry about it, because it's such a wild departure, and it makes a more faithful adaptation much less likely to be produced. When is it an asset to be unfamiliar with the source?

Then there are remakes or homages: when I was a teenager, I saw Bride and Prejudice, which asked "what if Pride & Prejudice, produced by Western filmmakers, inspired by Bollywood?" Or consider TV remakes for different markets, like Betty La Fea being made into the American show Ugly Betty, British The Office becoming American The Office: there are lots of questions about whether such localizations are necessary, and what each brings to the table.

Finally, consider fan interpretations. Two cases in video games that come to mind are:

Chrono Resurrection: Chrono Trigger is a cultural capstone for millenials; every console gamer above a certain age feels compelled to call it the greatest RPG ever made, and nothing will ever touch it (it was fine. I liked the sequel better. come at me). But Square Enix sat on it for so long, and fans loved it so much, folks started making this. Square decided It Should Not Be and killed it.

Black Mesa is similar, though Valve is cooler: people re-made the first Half-Life game, probably one of the most influential ever made, in newer engines. It got completed and released.

In all of these: who owns how much of each work? What is owed to the source? Where do the adapters get to show their craft? How much of your love or distaste for an adaptation is a function of creative choices vs. the level of craft? How did the real-world factors of the creators leak into the work (e.g. deadlines, funding, investors, cultural mores at the time)?

Casting choices

This came up when I wrote about Disco Elysium, but: how does casting affect how the audience receives a character? In that game, one political character speaks in a commonwealth accent, treats your character as an equal, and is self-aware; the other side of her conflict is "a walrus of a man" who's disingenuous and condescending, while speaking nasally. What if she was annoying as hell, and he was handsome? How would the political themes of the game hit differently?

Here's a spicy one: my sophomore year, my college put on Hot'n'Throbbing by Paula Vogel, a play where (SPOILERS! SPOILERS!) a woman is persuaded by her abusive ex-husband to stay at her house for a few hours. They reconnect a bit, you spend the whole play sensing the danger she's in, and the climax has him strangling her to death in a jealous, controlling rage. In a talkback discussion after the play, the dramaturg said something that still haunts me:

I like to think that, in 2007, we're at a time where we could have cast this couple as mixed-race, and a mixed-race couple wouldn't bat an eyelash. But if you put on a play where a Black man murders his White wife, or a White man murders his Black wife, the play suddenly takes on very different messages.

Since then, I can't help but cast different demographics in my mind for everything and wonder how it changes the piece.

Canonical characters like Dr. Who or James Bond. It's always such an ordeal who gets to be them, and what they bring to the role.

Consider audiobook readers, and how they change the experience of listening.

The questions in this are obvious: What would happen if you made different casting choices? There are more subtle ones, too: how do you compare performances? Can a character be handed-off from one cast member to the other (e.g. Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or the actor behind Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender)? How does the circumstances of that handoff affect the handoff?

Collaborations

A basic one, but: just putting people together. Part of why I think Chrono Trigger has its fame is the narrative of its collaboration: it was designed by the Hironobu Sakagushi (inventor of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (designer of Dragon Ball). While each of those properties was industry-leading at the time, colliding these particles produced new, exciting science.

Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland had separate careers, but when the two of them got together, they created Rick and Morty. When it was revealed that Justin was (is?) a total creep, narratives emerged on exactly what each of them brought (and destroyed) from the table.

Questions: how do you split responsibility for the success or failure of the project? How do the collaborators tell the story of the piece's creation differently? Can you guess which elements were placed by each major collaborator? For a given set of collaborators, what do you think they fought over? How should you appreciate or change how you understand the piece, knowing what you know now? Did they collaborate again, and what changed as a result?

Actual Handoffs

Finally: actual handoffs. When someone gives the reins of their art to someone else to drive. I mentioned Dr. Who before: consider the showrunners! Besides casting a new Doctor/companion combo, they have to bring their own mark and say something interesting while contributing to a continuity of one of TV's longest-running characters.

Think of the Dune novels, which were Frank Hebert, then got handed over to his son. Think of Star Wars when George Lucas had other writers and people checking his work (original trilogy) vs. when he didn't and was allowed to write his own scripts (prequel trilogy) vs. what Disney produced after he sold the IP.

Like with adaptations, there are a million great questions here: what do you owe your predecessors? How important is it that you leave your own mark? What techniques or conventions are available, in your story or your medium, to maintain continuity? What specific challenges are there to doing this if you were to split by genre? Is it advantageous to have more or less time between the handoffs? Is it more or less advantageous to be related, professionally or by blood, to the original author?

Killed by robots

The punchline to all of this: AI may well kill a lot of these "handoff spaces." There are technologists licking their lips on the possibility that AI keep you from having to deal with human artists, who have needs and opinions and expenses, but who also create the artifacts that I'm mentioning here. Consider:

• Translation. Even pre-LLM boom, Google Translate bragged about how ML-based their codebase is; now with LLMs it may be more possible to rely on human translators even less for things like novels, or localizing content made abroad.

• Casting: we're digitally de-aging actors instead of hiring new ones for young roles. We brought Grand Moff Tarkin back from the dead (and they even said the tech behind his resurrection is already out-of-date). Deepfakes, deepfakes, deepfakes.

• Audiobooks can be read by AI voices instead of people who can deliver a text with any understanding of what it means. Patrick Harrison is a brilliant actor and reader; an AI voice wouldn't be deeply familiar with the theory of Palo Alto, or give Cage Kings his performance of Conor McGregor's accent, but you can imagine publishers or Amazon wanting to use one anyway.

• Re: actual handoffs, people are making collaborations with dead artists. There are LLMs that are meant to simulate talking to Jesus, why wouldn't we ask LLM Frank Hebert to keep writing novels?

• Adaptations: we could ask the AI to make a screenplay outline and storyboards from a book. Some people think we may get it to make the whole movie; I think that one is still pretty far away, but Lord knows people are trying.

Given the limitations of AI, and that they can only produce variations of their training sets, I expect a lot of culture will "flatten," like what gets described in this excellent video on music soundtracks:

AI like the introduction of recorded music

This segues into a current favorite metaphor for AI. I'm in SF, so I'm told on a near-daily basis that this will change everything; adapt or get left behind, you fucking dinosaur. Everyone who devotes their lives to things like translation, writing, animation, coding... you will be made useless. The people who profit from this and their sycophants are very excited; the people I know who make or appreciate art, well, aren't; especially since all the art coming from AI is still pretty awful for anyone with taste. But who needs taste? The top-10 grossing movies of 2024 are literally all sequels. They killed an original movie that screened extremely well with test audiences for a tax writeoff. Hollywood will feed us slop, and in the absence of many alternatives due to decades of industry consolidation, we will eat it.

Look back at the questions I generated for each section: the people who like thinking about this stuff are feeling a profound loss. Meanwhile, the kinds of people excited about replacing humans with AI usually don't think to ask questions like that in the first place. Capital doesn't care about your feelings, and this is how it's moving. So if it comes to pass, what would this new world look like? I think it's going to be like the introduction of recorded music.

My brother had a short stint as a jazz musician, and my dad once commented that recorded music decimated the ability for someone to be a live musician. It hadn't occurred to me to really try imagining the world prior to recorded music. Absent things like player pianos or music boxes, if you wanted to be hearing music, there had to be a person playing it. Every social spot that needed music: get musicians. Courts? Musicians. Festivals? Musicians. Many more people played instruments at the home, many more humans were called to pick one up and play for literally whatever was happening.

And after recorded music? There's music everywhere. Businesses, diners, in my headphones while I code, in my car while I travel, while I cook, anytime I'm dancing (for fitness, art, or partying). I don't need a musician to play anything for me. On one hand, it's amazing. On the other hand, what did we lose?

You can imagine cultural critics at the time saying things like "but we're losing something human when you do this!" Things like the variation of a player's performance, and how it can be affected by their breakfast, or the weather, or politics. How special it might be to hear someone's best performance, or just as statistically unlikely (and therefore, just as special), their worst. You might be in a cafe and the musician might loudly fart. Like cuisine, towns can be places where musicians converge to make music havens (imagine how much more powerful Austin or Nashville are in this world). The popularity, proliferation, and invention of instruments could be based on things like ability to travel with the instrument. You'd hear a lot less music, because it's not free to reproduce, but also, all the music you'd hear would have a massive qualitative difference, with far-reaching implications to everything music touches.

This analysis would be 100% correct: the music I listen to is missing that special something, having been devalued into canned pap for me to tune out. But: I never knew another world. So I made due with this one, and you know? I'm fine. It's even pretty great! You'll never know what living on a planet with dodos would feel like either.

One could imagine AI killing all these human interactions. And while that world looks terrible to some of us, people would continue, artists will find a way, society would establish new norms. To reiterate: it would make me sad as hell to see AI caulking over these human gaps, and I don't take it as a given that a takeover that makes the world unrecognizable is even going to happen. But if it does, I'll try to focus on the best way to live in that world, much like recording technology hasn't damaged my ability to love music.