Page 217 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

And I thought about it for eight years so intensely that “But it really was a profound experience you thought,
when I arrived at this point - I remember very well, it for yourself?”
was in my apartment in Bologna at 6 o’clock - it was like Yes, for me, it was really touching, perhaps a little
playing the piano, like a jazz-musician: I put it all down narcissistic.
very easily with the computer, following my mind and “And perhaps especially since it was a sort of
only making the corrections underway. It was totally expression of love, as well, on the part of the people, in
written at the computer...it was just because there was that they had gone to all the trouble?”
more inspiration, so to speak. Yes, it was an expression of love on their part, but
People have still these kinds of mythological visions there was also an atmosphere, because my wife,
about the machine. And then there is a purposefully who was with me - and it was not her night - but she
faked production of mythology. Those who ask you the was equally impressed and touched by the magic of the
most naive questions about the computer; just seeing experience. So for me, it could have been narcissism,
it as some kind of mysterious machine that invents but for her it was really the emotion, of having the
for you, are journalists who are using them every day. impression of something that happened 60 years ago.
So they know that it is not true. But when the ask A kind of being in the past?”
questions, they try to make them the ones that the most Yes, it was really beautiful.
naive reader would make. So there is a kind of play of “So it is in fact possible to do a simulation which is so

UMBERTO ECO IN CONVERSATION WITH PETRU RUSSU, FINE ARTIST. PICTURE CREDIT: © MARTA DIMITRESCU

bad faith, mauvaise fois. So the journalist, who knows real that it has a profound effect upon the person, by
exactly that it is not the computer which invents for means of technology?”
him or her, is the one who co-operates in the spreading Certainly, you can enjoy Beethoven on a compact disc
An Interview with Umberto Eco, by Patrick John Coppock, February 1995
Patrick John Coppock: Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
of the Metropolitan legend, the false rumour about the better than with the 78 disc...and sometimes better
extraordinary intelligence of the computer. than in a small theatre with a “medium rare” orchestra.
“I was thinking about that book that you published just So I am absolutely... Well, I am a recorder player, and
recently: Six walks in the Fictional Woods. It was rather now the Japanese production of plastic recorders has
nice the last essay you had there. The final bit where you reached such a level of sophistication that, then you
were taken into this kind of planetarium...” can of course still have a top recorder of superior
Ah, yes, the planetarium. quality costing $5,000, made by a top craftsman, but if
“...where you experienced the moment of your birth. you compare a good plastic recorder and a normal, old
Yes, now that’s a kind of virtual reality experience, isn’t wooden one, the plastic ones keep their sound quality;
it?” and they don’t suffer from temperature and humidity.
Yes, certainly, and it really was computer prepared, And though perhaps not for a soloist, but certainly
because only the computer could remake the sky of for a group or orchestra they can work very well. No
that evening. objections.

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