The Call of the New
Occasional address given for AIT Sydney graduation ceremony — 7 April 2017
Humans. We are amazing.
This is what I was thinking this earlier this week, wondering as you do, what does a director who graduated over 24 years ago really have to say to a room full of newly minted makers. The context in which you’re graduating is so different from mine. In the space of a few decades, we’ve seen incredible changes and there’s more to come. Let me share with you my perspective on what I love about this space we all work in.
My career has been both defined and derailed by the Web. For a brief moment in time, just up the road there at Sydney Uni I was one of the only person in NSW using the Web. A pretty average Arts student working in a basement near City Road making telnet connections to UNIX servers in CERN in Switzerland and the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications. I wasn’t there on merit. I was lucky. I was in the right place and time to spot an opportunity and share in collaborative history being made. It was a tiny online community building the Web one open source server at a time around the world in a concentrated spirit of sharing and goodwill that sadly dissipated within a few years. As each site launched, it was added to the Web’s What’s New list and Tim Berners-Lee sent you a welcome message by hand. It was a bit like the VR community a few years ago.
Just imagine taking a break from your course, meeting friends at the pub and trying to describe the World Wide Web to people who have never ever been online. Well that was me in 1993. Working hard to make sense to my peeps and and also to get my Computer Science Honours project — a web browser/editor to compile. I called it WHype — as in Writer for Hypertext not as in Wipe your data — but I won’t lie. WHype’s first users were very patient.
Fast forward to today and I’m still working hard to describe what I do. I run a small studio Mod that has created all manner of new immersive interactive experiences. But it’s never easy. When a concept doesn’t already exist yet it can be hard to explain.
It can be frustrating. Sometimes impossible to communicate clearly. Interactive media designer Dale Heristad described this cognitive barrier as the Wall of the New. He worked on Spielberg’s team designing the AR UI in the 2002 movie Minority Report. It’s old now but the Wall is still here.
I feel very lucky to work in this space. Ridiculously privileged. But it’s not easy, especially in risk-adverse Sydney. On good days this is my dream gig. I’m an artist who gets to explore and share ideas. I’m a director who gets to work with teams turning ideas into something real, and I’m a technologist who gets to experience that most incredible of satisfactions — seeing complex systems designed, built and working.
After uni I got offered two jobs. I could go work for a small startup ISP called Ozemail — to keep working on my web browser — or I could go down to Canberra and set up the National Library of Australia’s web service. It was a huge decision at the time but I chose the Library and in some ways that choice defined me.
I never regretted becoming the NLA’s first “webmaster” (even though it sounds so daggy now doesn’t it? Bit like He-man or Beast Master). Even after Ozemail became the first Australian company to float on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Investors like Malcolm Turnbull in Ozemail made 10 times their money back.
I took a different path. I spent several years in the public service learning to build and run systems at enterprise scale. I resolved some gender identity issues that were at the time incredibly distracting and then I took off to Europe to find my place in the wider world. I got to work on a lot of firsts. The BBC’s first social network. The highest valued internet startup in Europe. Lots and lots of startups. Which funded lots of interactive films and storytelling experiments, by working as a gun-for-hire on these startups. And then around 2003 I took the plunge as an indie to focus on building teams.
Every year, the out-there ideas that my friends have been hearing me talk about since uni become less and less outlandish. I’m often told my time has come but I’m not convinced. It’s still early and there are still lots of bills to pay. But yes, in theory, for me and my posse who direct interactive experience (some of us since CDROM days) this could be our time.
When Mod launched ACO Virtual — our immersive interactive video experience of the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2013 there was not a single recognisable project we could point to and say, “that’s kinda how we made it”. Then the film Gravity came out, shot by car robots (out of Detroit) powered by a real-time graphics engine. Gravity won many Oscars but it’s not at the cinemas anymore. ACO Virtual is still on tour, chugging away on that same real-time engine.
A few months ago at GDC Epic Games revealed that the droid in Star Wars Rogue One made cinema history. The previz version of K-2S0 rendered real-time in a game engine was good enough for the final cut. The Oscar winning Jungle Book movie — transporting audiences to another world — was a virtual production shot entirely in downtown LA in a warehouse not much bigger than this. The Deep Mind team formed by chess champions and game developers is now part of Google refining the AI to play any game and beat the masters.
It’s not just about technology. All this code and hardware is made by people like you. Amazing folk with all their talents and flaws. With an unprecedented amount of data at your figure tips, the majority of decisions you make this month will be made on raw emotion, not facts.
Humans are amazing. We can land a spacecraft on a comet but climate change is too hard. We can make a beautiful film like A Monster Calls — that uses state-of-the-art CG to help children process the death of a loved one. We just can’t get people to go see it (except in Spain where it set box office records). We’d rather watch Logan.
Facebook links your profile to photos taken of you without any human intervention but the NYPD has no way of checking your identity beyond name and birthday. As The Guardian reported this week, if you’re born on the same day with the same name in the US, good luck trying to untangle your affairs and just hope your namesake isn’t subject to racial profiling.
Deep learning is revolutionising more than just board games but already it has a “white guy problem”. Microsoft researchers say the AI industry is a “sea of dudes”. Our machines are fully capable of learning bias and unconscious discrimination.
That library job I got after uni is now a one-liner. You can run a web site at the push of a button. Do I feel obsolete? No. Just never complacent.
World building is bloody hard. Griefing is so much easier. Designers and developers, you will face ethical choices in your careers. How and what you make has consequences.
For my little studio, the future is mixed reality but not $5K headsets. As part of the new W3C Mixed Reality Service community I’m excited that we’re rethinking relationship between the physical and digital world. It’s nothing new but there’s always room for improvement.
It may seem like every avenue has already been explored, every niche filled, every opportunity already mined but that’s not how life works.
Today’s world is not tomorrow’s. Armed with your insights, energy and hunger you now have an opportunity to define the next couple of decades. The platforms your children use won’t be the same as the ones my generation built after we graduated.
Us first generation web folks picked up the ball and ran with it. We invented ecommerce, we learnt what worked (and mostly what didn’t work) with interactive entertainment. We laid the foundations for social. And most of us have never stopped learning and building.
Your story will be different. I hope you find your peeps. They’re amazing.
