feeling our way
Evan Murphy (Furniture 2011) sent around a link to Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense presentation at TED:
This seems a case of research meeting demand. Our fingers are already pressing surfaces expecting them to respond. I'm not talking about sex, though our negotiation of digital environments, in terms of touch and exploration, seems to borrow from models of sexuality, female rather than phallic. I'm talking about information. For anyone who spends substantial parts of the day in digital environments, the real world can seem full of cul-de-sacs and dead ends. It just seems to stop suddenly. Either you have to physically go somewhere to continue. Or the trajectory disintegrates. You want to find something in the book you're holding? Well, good luck! Everything seems like so much work, with so little possibility of success. I have to search through every page to find that word I half-remember? Suddenly time, so fluid online, becomes weighty again.
I can see the attraction of Maes and Mistry's Sixth Sense. My fingertips and mind want it already. I have questions. When any surface yields programmed information to the soliciting touch what will work mean? What will space mean? How will this affect time? These concepts are already in flux, thinly anchored by hardware or workstation to traditional understanding. Skin itself becomes less boundary than intelligent organ (which is what boundaries in general are becoming).
When surfaces respond in programmed ways to our touch will our interaction with our environment be more or less physical? Our physical experience on earth gives rise to our metaphors and conceptual understanding. What conceptual shifts will crucial shifts in physical experience produce? When the outside comes in, physically and on an informational scale never before approached, i.e., the chip in the brain, inside and outside lose valence as concepts in relation to the body, their most basic seat.
And a lesser question: Poetry has had great fun gamboling with every technology thrown up. Instead of experimenting at the exhilarating fringes of new technology will poetry, or art, ever become again the repository of the heart, i.e., raw, gristly human values? And another lesser question: Teaching can no longer be concerned with the transmission of information which students can access themselves. Teaching, to some extent, may be concerned with selecting or recommending information, i.e., it has an editing function. But this generation of teachers is being brutally challenged because neither the what nor the how, as we learned it, can be reasonably passed on.
Students are our teachers, in so many fields. At RISD, the teaching of demonstrable skills, or the time to learn and practice them, has continued validity. In addition to skills, there must be a range of meta-areas morphing into relevance as the definition of the disciplines weakens. Some of them might be quite old-fashioned: conversation, discourse itself, rudimentary politics, ethics. If we really thought about a visionary curriculum for artists and designers for these opening decades of the 21st century, what surprises could we ignite?
