After its Autumn maintenance shutdown, the Large Idea Collider is back up to operating temperature. I’ve run a few simple tests in the shower this morning (the cooling system?)
A link provided by video provocateur http://emmapuente.com/ showed a dancer interacting with a digital grid, projected onto an invisible net box in which she performed. It reminded me of a band called ‘Mad Action’, that I saw in about 2003. They were a 2-piece who performed inside a 3-sided white box onto which were projected the shadows of 2 other virtual musicians, probably also them, who were also playing on a pre-recorded backing track. Their ‘real world shadows’ were also cast onto the sheet. The audience experience was a combination of reality and projection from a virtual world and different from those trapped inside the boxes, arguably more ‘real’.
For quite a while, I’ve been using the Internet slang IRL (In Real Life) fairly sarcastically, as a large proportion of my life seems to take part in this semi-virtual domain. Obviously, I’m not alone here, @euan regularly talks about his networked life, http://euansemple.com/theobvious/.
As already reported, the time-shifted video of Hal Abelson’s (http://codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/) 6.001 course at MIT re-enforced my belief that process (and therefore software) exists outside of our gravitational field. It is a world in which, he argues, we can do anything we can imagine. He must lack imagination but we can do ALMOST anything.
The question then, is: where is the Human Computer Interface now? Forget that question! Half of the computational machinery I use is virtual too. Where is the boundary between reality and our (almost) wildest dreams?
Here’s a woman dancing in a virtual box. Or is it the other way around?
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/dancer-bends-light-in-stunning-projection-mapped-performance?utm_source=Facebook
p.s. Is this what famous mathematician Charles Dodgson was grasping for, in his philosophical book about mirrors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll
On The Outside 