The real promise of digital realities
APRIL 4TH, 2016 — POST 091
WARNING: This is the kind of piece you write when you’ve dropped the ball and got to writing way too late. That is to say, it’s shit.
If you’ve been reading my daily posts lately, you might have noticed me slipping. All posts last week went live well after I would have liked them to and today I’m finally making headway on the day’s piece more than 14 hours behind schedule. Hindsight can often indicate the ease at which sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph can hammer through my keyboard but sometimes that string is particularly difficult to get started. Quite often ideas can just sit behind my forehead like tepid, tangled spaghetti.
I’m in the very early stages of fleshing out my next movie idea. Everytime I start something, I’m racked with anxiety about the mechanism by which it will start to take shape in a world outside my head. Just like with today’s writing, ideas, especially in their nascent, amorphous state, don’t want to march in single file. And unfortunately, most mechanisms that have the potential to substantiate these ideas require them doing just that.
I’ve written recently about the nature of the social network feed, namely its unidimensional linearity. Understandably, this is inherited from the core unit of the feed: time. Whether chronological or reverse-chronological, our feeds are most intuitively represented along a line with “Past” and “Present” as its two ends. The bulk of that which we consume — specifically text, video, and sound — are bound to the line. Linear order makes sense for consumption: a work translated bit by bit sequentially in the mind of the consumer. And as such, so much technology is geared toward this end. I can only write in one direction with pen and paper, or keyboard and wordprocessor. I can only run video or record sound in a single direction too. But creation often defies linearisation.
This is the reason we have techniques like mind-mapping, two-dimensional representations of the ideation and creative processes. Even apps like Trello can facilitate two-dimensional thinking: its lists and cards operating along two axes. Often associated with “visual thinkers”, these processes are attractive for providing a path of lesser resistence to the substantiation of ideas. But even the most flexible of tools that deal in two-dimensions (I’m looking at you Prezi) can’t capture the multitudes of ways one might want to render ideas in physical or digital space. With either one- or two-dimensional tools, how can I create clusters of ideas, translate weak or strong ties between clusters, or even metaphorically “hang” the wide variety of media types, from video to music to still image, all within the same workspace?
Three-dimensional tools for creative productivity are what most intrigue me about the possibilities offered by developments in virtual and augmented reality. Like the curation of a personal art gallery, or a walk-in Tumblr page, the generation of virtual spaces could prove to be the killer application of these new pieces of hardware. How exactly this technology is poised to disrupt the typical workplace remains to be seen. However, it is almost certain that it will extend well beyond conservative predictions of facilitating conference calls or serving schematics to workers in manufacturing.
For me at least, I often encounter the limits of the expressive capabilities of the tools most often at hand. I know, a poor tradesman blames his tools (and this has been a rich display of poor trade). But there had to have been a few tradesmen who got sick of just using a mallet.
Right?
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