Month: August 2010

After a while, Amelia had just gotten used to him being there. She’d decided at some point that the shadow was definitely a “he”, although she couldn’t exactly say why. In any case, it was nice to know that even when she was alone, she probably wasn’t really alone.

Sometimes when she was with a boy, she would feel the shadow’s presence, and she’d wonder what the boy would have thought if he knew. Sometimes she was almost tempted to tell, just to see what would happen. But of course she never did.

Not even when she met the boy she was going to marry. He was very sweet, and she knew right away they were going to get married. But of course she always knew what was going to happen. This wasn’t something she’d realized all at once, but gradually she had picked up a way of thinking from the shadow, of seeing that the future is really just like the past, except in a mirror. Once you see that, then you can see how to remember things that haven’t happened yet.

The hardest part was not letting people know, and remembering to act surprised when she was supposed to be surprised, or scared when she was supposed to be scared. That time the tree fell in the yard and killed aunt Emma, it was hard not to tell anybody beforehand. She had to go through the whole morning like nothing was going to happen. The shadow said it was important to act like you don’t know things until they happen.

Since those earlier experiments with 3D printing, my collaborators and I here at the Banff Centre have been working to make my little animated guy walk in the real world. As a test, we’ve printed him out in each of the twelve positions of a complete walk cycle:

This isn’t the final result, it’s just a proof of concept to see whether things are going to work out. In this run, we printed each pose as a separate object. This allowed us to quickly get a sense of what we were going to end up with.

Because he generally has one foot raised in the air, each piece won’t stand up on its own. So to get a sense of what the finished zoetrope might look like, I propped up each raised foot with crumpled double-sticky transparent tape, as you can see in this close-up:

In the production version the entire zoetrope will be printed in one connected piece, so each pose of the guy will be in exactly the right position. The final run is printing now — I can hear the machine working away as I type this.

We are all very excited — it looks like we’re finally rounding the corner. With any luck, I can show you an animation by Thursday!

Amelia looked at herself in the mirror. She liked to wander up in the attic, she’d always felt comfortable there. Sometimes it was just her, and other times she sensed — she called it the shadow. She wasn’t sure when she’d first become aware of it. Sometime in the last two years more or less.

But she also had a feeling that the shadow had always been there. She wasn’t scared of it exactly — it wouldn’t make sense to be scared of it. That would be like being scared of your own dreams. And the shadow was something that had definitely come out of her dreams, she was sure about that.

The best way to know if it was there was to look in the mirror. It’s not that she could see it exactly, more that her own reflection looked different when the shadow was there. Older somehow, but not really older. More like the idea of being older, even though she looked exactly the same.

She shook her head. So many times she’d been tempted to tell somebody, to explain it. It’s hard to keep something like this to yourself. But she always ended up realizing just how crazy it would sound. And she definitely didn’t want anyone to think she was crazy.

Besides, she had a feeling that if she told anyone, the shadow wouldn’t like it.

In response of my post two days ago, Mari wrote a thoughtful comment which contained the following:

“All these gadgets making us as human beings actually dumber (!?)… and less sensitive as communicators? I was just looking at some music pedagogical things they are doing here and thought, “but we’ve been making music just fine for 100s of years without these…”. All is geared towards ‘easier’ way of being creative human beings…like conductor for dummies, violin players for dummies so you don’t have to listen, train and practice like the old days. Clearly that’s where the $ support (toy companies etc) comes from.”

Coincidentally, last week I was having pretty much the same discussion, mostly because of my recent experience putting together the MakerBot. Assembling that was hard. Many steps required me to push my personal envelope, and to learn technical skills that were new to me. And for that reason it was incredibly fun.

I’d had pretty much the same ecstatic feeling while I was learning to play classical and flamenco guitar — a process that took a lot of hard work over many months. When I think back to my peak life experiences, all of them required me to push beyond what I had thought myself capable of. And while I very much enjoyed those “relax and do nothing” vacations — lying on a nice beach and looking at the sunset — not one of them was a powerful peak pleasure experience for me.

If the goal of your business is to provide experiences for people that maximize their quality of life, then you’ll want to give them opportunities for meaningful challenges. Generally speaking, people feel most alive when they are actively engaged in something that they working for, and that holds some significant meaning for them. The political candidate you worked to get elected, that day you hiked all the way up a mountain, the Shakespeare play you worked on all summer, the time you cooked all day to create an amazing meal for someone you love — these are experiences that make us feel we’ve really lived.

But if the goal of your business is to maximize profitability, it is far easier to ask your customers to do as little work as possible. An experience that substitutes the illusion of mastery of skills is a far easier sell than one that requires the customer to achieve true mastery. For example, there is money to be made in giving guitar lessons, but there is vastly more money to be made in selling Guitar Hero and its equivalents.

I worry that the combination of new technologies might be conspiring to create a perfect storm — an entire generation is coming of age expecting the illusion of truly rewarding effortful experience, since selling such illusions can scale up far more easily than selling the real thing.

Certainly the commoditization of illusory skill building is not new. The Craft Master “Paint by Number” kits first sold in 1950 by Max Klein and Dan Robbins were a huge and immediate success. In a sense, they were the Guitar Hero of their era. But now such commercial plays are the rule, rather than the exception. The concept of putting in hours of effort to create a truly rewarding personal experience — once the norm, and in fact a defining trait of the American “can do” ethos — may be gradually fading from our culture, as it is supplanted by an illusory Potemkin version of itself.

But maybe not. There is definitely some hi-tech consumer software out there that encourages — and richly rewards — effort and originality. PhotoShop, GarageBand, and GameMaker come to mind, and there are plenty of others. There is also a growing youth subculture that puts enormous effort and talent into creating some of the most intriguing videos on YouTube. This movement of video creation as individual craft is arguably a successor to the youth-led — and substantially home grown — popular music revolution of the twentieth century.

So maybe there’s hope. 🙂

When Jenny awoke she was standing back out in the hallway, surrounded by her fellow travelers. “How did I get back out here?” she asked.

“You walked out the door,” Josh said, looking at her with a concerned expression that she found oddly pleasing. “Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything after — oh wait. I learned that time is just another dimension, if you know how to look at it.”

“Seems like today is a real banner day for higher dimensions,” Charlie said. “My head is starting to hurt.”

Sid laughed. “Maybe you’re just outa’ your depth.”

Jenny looked puzzled. “Am I missing something?”

Josh explained. “Before you came back, Mr. Symarian was explaining to us how there are more dimensions than the three we can see. Is that right?”

“Yes, quite correct,” the teacher said. “But I believe Jenny is speaking of something else entirely.”

“Yes,” she said excitedly. “Time is something like Mr. Symarian’s extra dimensions, but it’s also different. The past and the future don’t have to be strung out on a line, like the way we think about it. They can all be together, like when you look at a painting.”

“Cool!” Josh said. “Does that mean you can tell the future?”

Jenny thought for a moment, then shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think so. It’s not something we, um, humans can do.”

“Why not?” Josh asked.

“Well, maybe you could know the future, but I think that even if you did know it, it wouldn’t matter anyway. I mean, once you know all the things that haven’t happened yet, you start to think differently, and you stop caring about words like ‘before’ and ‘after’. And then it turns out you can’t change anything at all, because to do something — anything — you need to decide what to do, and you can’t decide what to do if you don’t have a before and an after. So basically, having all time mushed together in your head would make you crazy, and you can’t do anything about anything if you’re crazy.” She stopped, realizing that the others were all staring at her. “Does that make any sense?” she finished weakly.

“Yes, that makes perfect sense,” said Mr. Symarian.

I don’t have an iPad. I’m waiting for something a bit less proprietary to show up in that general space. But I have noticed something completely delightful and unexpected about the iPad, as I watch my colleagues use it.

Many of us have had the experience of being in a meeting where somebody has their laptop computer open. As the meeting goes on, this person is typing away, staring intently at their screen. If you ask them, they will usually swear up and down that they are paying attention to every word that is being said in the room, but nobody ever quite believes them.

Full confession: I’ve been that person. I never start out intending to be that person. I’ll be using my notebook computer to take notes about the meeting, when all of a sudden an email comes in that I just cannot ignore. My responsibilities to that vast world outside the room start to tug at my soul, and I end up switching contexts, telling myself that sending off a reply will only take a moment. But of course that’s irrelevant. By that time I’ve pulled out of the flow of the conversation, and on some level the meeting has already been damaged.

Which is why I think “laptops closed” is a great general policy for meetings. Nicely enough, this policy also causes people to take shorter meetings. 🙂

Which leads me to the iPad.

I have a colleague who always used to be looking at his iPhone during meetings. He claimed to be paying attention to the meeting, but it was hard to know whether to believe him.

Recently this colleague got an iPad. When meetings start he places it out lying flat on the table — and he no longer uses his iPhone during meetings. He looks down at the iPad quite often, but now everyone can see the screen, so everybody knows he is doing tasks that are relevant to the discussion — checking his calendar when we plan events, or typing little notes about what is being said in the room.

There is no doubt about what is going on, and therefore there is no mistrust about what he is doing. Even when he is looking at his list of emails, he knows that we all know what’s on his screen, so everyone is confident he is looking for something relevant to what is currently happening in the meeting room.

I don’t have any idea whether Apple planned this style of usage (a friend pointed out to me that they likely didn’t, given the way Steve Jobs demoed the iPad at its launch). It may just be one of those lucky accidents that only get discovered after a product is launched.

But it seems to me that this usage pattern is a very important development in the evolution of personal electronic media. At last we have a scenario in which individual access to an information appliance does not destroy — or even degrade — the integrity and connectedness of a meeting.

It would be nice to think that Apple actually worked all this out before the iPad was released. But somehow I doubt it. I think we all just got lucky.

Mr. Symarian looked distinctly put out. “Josh, I take you are quite finished now.”

“Yes,” Josh said, smiling contentedly, “I am quite finished now.”

“Very well,” the teacher said, “it is time for me to reveal my true nature.” He paused dramatically.

There was a long silence. The silence grew longer.

Finally Josh couldn’t stand it anymore. “Well?” he said. “I’m waiting.”

“I stand before you, Mr. Symarian intoned. “Transformed!” And again he held his pose.

“I don’t get it,” Josh said.

“I told ya teach,” Sid said. “They don’t get that kind of stuff around here. It’s too, you know, dimensional.”

“Dimensional?” Charlie asked. “What’s dimensional about standing there looking exactly the same as before?”

“You wanna I should explain it to them?” Sid asked.

“Yes,” the teacher said, looking disheartened. “I suppose someone should.”

“He’s not the same as before,” Sid said. “You’re looking through the back now.”

“The back?” Josh said. “The back of what?”

“The back of him. See, the teacher here is higher dimensional. He’s got other directions — you just can’t see ’em. This is a big trick where he comes from — flip over and show everyone the other side. I keep explaining to him that down here the back side and the front side look the same. But does he listen? Does he ever listen?”

“You guys are making this stuff up,” Josh said, “aren’t you?”

Sid sighed. “Teach, turn half way first.”

Suddenly Mr. Symarian was gone. Josh and Charlie looked in astonishment at the space where he had just been. Then, just as suddenly as he had vanished, he reappeared in the same spot.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “How did you do that?”

“I simply took the advice of our little friend here. I rotated a quarter circle, paused for a moment, and then rotated another quarter circle. I must say I find this entire episode extremely disappointing. As you can see, I have now returned to my original orientation.”

“I can’t see any difference,” Josh said, looking over at Charlie. “Can you see any difference?” Charlie just shook his head.

“See teach?” Sid said cheerfully, “It’s like I been tellin’ ya. On this world they really can’t tell the front from the back. But the quarter turn trick — that gets ’em every time.”

I just saw Christopher Nolan’s Inception for the second time in the same week. It’s not that I loved the film so much the first time, but rather that I find myself in a different city, with different friends who hadn’t seen it, and it just seemed like a good idea.

I won’t say much about the film here, because I wouldn’t want to ruin the experience for those of you who have not seen it.

But if you have already seen it, I am happy to report that it is vastly better the second time. The first time around the experience is something like trying to catch up and learn the rules of a strange game. It’s hard to focus on the experience of playing a game when you’re worrying about where the ball is supposed to go, or how many houses it takes to make a hotel. The first time seeing Inception is very much like that.

The second time around, everything makes sense — perfect sense. All the pieces fall into place, and moments early in the film that seemed on first viewing to be mysterious, or even downright impenetrable, are a complete delight the second time around. Which means there is more room to concentrate on the powerful underlying themes of the film, which I now finally appreciate.

I wonder what it says about a film when the second time seeing it is a vastly more rewarding experience than the first time. Does this quality speak well for the work? “Better on second viewing” seems like a rather unusual and intriguing quality. There are many movies I’ve enjoyed just fine but wouldn’t dream of ever seeing again — generally silly comedies or straight-ahead melodramas that promise very little and deliver faithfully on that promise.

At the other extreme, there are films like Casablanca and Blade Runner that I can watch over and over. Each viewing is different, and I find I am never bored. In some sense the true subject of such endlessly watchable films is film itself — the mystery of sitting in a darkened theatre and experiencing living dreams about the human condition. Like a great painting by Magritte or poem by Walt Whitman, they illuminate the mystery of the human heart while managing to preserve that mystery, in all its complex magnificence.

It’s too soon to tell whether Inception falls into that category. I suppose I’ll know better the next time I see it. 🙂

“The plural seems more natural,” said the specter. “To speak of an individual is to speak from a fixed position in time. The concept is clear, but the reality is difficult. All time exists, in a glorious tapestry. Your grandmother, once removed from the oppressive ‘now’, possesses all the joy that she has ever experienced.”

Jenny frowned. “I think I understand, but I’m not sure. It’s like you’re saying a movie is the same as a sculpture. But they’re not the same.”

The specter remained silent for a long moment. When he again spoke, his voice was very quiet. “You will need to see for yourself.”

“See what?” Jenny said. But before she could utter another word, the room seemed to rush around her, as though she were being pulled into a tunnel. She felt herself trying to cry out, but the sound from her throat merely hung in the air somewhere before her eyes, like a smudge upon a vast canvas.

It took some time for her mind to process what she was experiencing. Everything was smooshed together, and nothing made any sense. Gradually she began to perceive landmarks. There was her mom, but her mom was young, younger than Jenny had ever seen her. And also old, all at once. She saw days in her life, events she had barely remembered, suddenly there before her, clear as day, as though they were happening right now.

But “happening” wasn’t exactly the right word. Jenny found she could move around everything, like walking around a sculpture. Depending on where she went, any moment she looked at seemed different, like when Josh gave her a frog for her eleventh birthday or the day her dad died. As she changed her point of view, the same day could be sad or happy, funny or just plain weird. It was strange and familiar at the same time, like she’d always known all those ways of seeing things, but hadn’t really been paying attention.

It was all too much, this everything at once. She tried to speak, to say she wanted it to stop, but it was no use. There was no “now” to speak from. Maybe if she could get to the present, to the room — the day — where they had been talking. She had to find her way back.

And that’s when Jenny saw her grandmother Amelia. But not the way she had ever seen her grandmother before — the way he saw her. It all came rushing in at once, filling her head.

And then everything went black.

Mari’s comment in response to one of my recent posts has gotten me thinking about the nature of subjective experience. Mari wonders what the experience might be like, once technology allows one person to see through the eyes of another.

I think she is actually raising a rather deep point, because “seeing” is not really a passive experience — it’s a highly active one. To engage in the simple act of looking around is to engage our entire self — our body, our sense of smell, touch, proprioception. There is a vast difference between, say, watching a movie, in which someone else is calling the shots, and experiencing reality first-hand, through one’s own eyes, head and body.

What would it mean to see through the eyes of another? Which participant — the local or the remote observer — would be in control? To see through another’s eyes, would we need to remotely control the motion of the other person’s head, their body, the reflexive saccadic movements of their pupils when something moves within their line of sight?

And would we need to feel what they feel for it all to truly make sense? If they tilt their head or turn around quickly, would we need to experience a disturbance in our own inner ear? Would our proprioceptive sense need to be attuned to the position of their hand when they reach beyond their line of vision to pick up an object? Should our own fingers feel their touch upon that object?

I’m not saying these things merely to ridicule them. With sufficient time and technological advancement, any of these possibilities may come to fruition. I’m simply wondering, as with each passing year we embrace ever more advanced forms of socially networked interconnection, and the time-space boundaries between us start to fall away, whether our very notions of self and identity will also begin to blur and change in some fundamental way.

What will it mean, exactly, when we can see through the eyes of another?