AWS and UFOs

Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.

Virtual Realism

His words hovered in my mind for months, then boomeranged with painful irony. What he said over lunch held the future in a horrible way that neither of us could grasp at the time. His words foreshadowed a tragedy that would injure him and implicate our schizophrenic culture. At the time, the prophetic words were innocent of the shadowy terrorist the FBI calls “the Unabomber.” Lunch was at a Sheraton Hotel on the second day of a national conference on virtual reality held in Washington, D.C., December 1-2, 1992. I had organized the conference for the Education Foundation of the Data Processing Management Association, and Professor David Gelernter was the keynote speaker. I had been looking forward to talking with him, and lunch seemed a perfect opportunity. The Yale computer scientist had invented the Linda programming language and had also written eloquently about the human side of computing. I knew him not only as a writer but also as a friendly reader of my books. I looked forward to an exchange of ideas. Our conversation moved from pleasantries to questions about how to humanize the computer. Several of David Gelernter’s sentences imprinted themselves on my memory and later played back to me in ways I could not—would not—have imagined: “We are on a social collision course,” he warned. “One portion of our population is building computer systems—the software cathedrals of this era — while another portion grows increasingly alienated from computers. This situation holds the greatest danger of a cultural collision.” Here was a premonition about the cyberspace backlash. Seven months later, on June 24, 1993, David Gelernter opened a mail package on the fifth floor of the Watson computer science building at Yale, and the package blew up in his face. The office was in flames, and David barely escaped. He staggered to the campus clinic, arriving just in time to save his life. The permanent injuries he suffered from the mail bomb included a partially blinded right eye, damage in one ear, and a maimed right hand.

VR 101

Today we call many things “virtual.” Virtual corporations connect teams of workers located across the country. In leisure time, people form clubs based on shared interests in politics or music, without ever meeting face-to-face. Even virtual romances flourish through electronic mail. All sorts of hybrid social realities have sprung up on fax machines and computers, cellular telephones and communication satellites. Yet most of these “virtual realities” are not, in the strict sense of the term, virtual reality. They are pale ghosts of virtual reality, invoking “virtual” to mean anything based on computers. A strong meaning of virtual reality, however, ties together these looser meanings. A certain kind of technology—“VR” for short—has become the model for a pervasive way of seeing things. Contemporary culture increasingly depends on information systems, so that we find virtual reality in the weak sense popping up everywhere, while virtual reality in the strong sense stands behind the scenes as a paradigm or special model for many things. The first step in virtual realism is to become clear about the meaning of virtual reality in the strong sense of the term. We need to be clear about using virtual reality as a model because the loose or weak sense of virtual reality grows increasingly fuzzy as the face value of the term wears down in the marketplace, where virtual reality sells automobiles and soap. Car manufacturers use virtual reality in television commercials: “Climb out of that virtual reality and test drive the real road car that stimulates all five senses!” Newspaper cartoons and entertainment parks pump the popularity of virtual reality. Products on CD-ROM bill their 3-D (three dimensional) graphics as “true virtual reality.” AT&T welcomes you into its “virtual world.” The term now belongs to the universal vocabulary. But movies and seasonal television shows should not stretch VR to a thin vapor. Because virtual reality belongs to an important part of the future, we need to understand it not only as an undercurrent affecting cultural developments but also as a powerful technology in its own right.

The Art of Virtual Reality

The snow hits your windshield without mercy. The car’s headlights reveal nothing about the highway. You can only guess where the lanes are, where the shoulder begins, where the exit ramps might be. The blizzard has so iced the road that you crawl along at five miles an hour. Other travelers sit stranded in their cars off the road, lights dimming in the dark. Hours later, you flop exhausted on the bed. Tension tightens your shoulders and forehead. You close your eyes. On the back of your eyelids, everything appears again in startling detail: the swirling snowflakes, the headlights, the windshield wipers fighting the moisture — all in slow motion this very minute. . . . > Modern art objects had aesthetic appeal when the viewer could stand apart from them to appreciate their sensory richness, their expressive emotion, or their provocative attitude. Today, detached contemplation still holds antique charm, as the contemporary scene presents quite different circumstances. . . . Flashbacks, a kind of waking nightmare, often belong to your first experiences with virtual reality. Subtract the terror and sore muscles and you get an idea of how I felt after two and a half hours in the exhibit Dancing as the Virtual Dervish (Banff, Alberta). Even the next day, my optical nerves held the imprint of the brightly colored transhuman structures. I could summon them with the slightest effort—or see them sometimes in unexpected flashes of cyberspace. . . . > Art is coming to terms with interactivity, immersion, and information intensity. Aesthetics—the delighted play of the senses—cannot preserve its traditional detachment. The modern museum with its bright spaces and airy lighting is giving way to darkened rooms glowing with computer screens and hands-on buttons. . . . For hours, you feel a touch of perceptual nausea, a forewarning of the relativity sickness called AWS (Alternate World Syndrome) in my book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Everything seems brighter, even slightly illusory. Reality afterwards seems hidden underneath a thin film of appearance. Your perceptions seem to float over a darker, unknowable truth. The world vibrates with the finest of tensions, as if something big were imminent, as if you were about to break through the film of illusion.

Nature and Cyber space

In March 1993 at the SCI-ARC School of Architecture in Los Angeles, a student posed a question to Jaron Lanier, the famous entrepreneur or Virtual Reality. “How,” the student asked, “will VR enhance architecture.” The stocky genius smiled, ran a hand through dangling dreadlocks, and responded enthusiastically: “VR allows us to embellish computer-generated buildings with wonderful enhancements. Users can decorate electronic environments with dazzling colors and sign them with fun designs.” Lanier went on to say that the physical dwellings of the future would probably be cheap, dull, unadorned shelters generated by robot factories to put no-frills roofs over the heads of an overpopulated humanity. To compensate for the squalid physical surroundings, VR would provide habitations for interactive personal expression and aesthetic enjoyment. Lanier described a future in which cyberspace offers solace for the loss of natural, livable, environmental space. Lanier’s provocative mix of enthusiasm and pessimism supports many critics who attack cyberspace as a fatal form of escape. Chapter 2 showed us some of the critics who stand on the ground of naive realism. For them, virtual identities diminish physical identities. If we look, in fact, more closely at the naïve realists, we find an anxiety about the physical ground on which they stand. The firm ground the critics feel themselves standing on actually covers an underlying sinkhole. The nature to which the critics appeal has in recent years been threatened. A large cavity gapes in the human attachment to nature. Naïve realists want to protect reality from cyberspace, but they are not so sure about how deeply we are still attached to nature. Virtual reality seems to wean us from spontaneous affection toward mother nature where our birthright seems to shrink more every day. Is VR a consolation for the lost charms of natural things? Isn’t such a cyberspace a grand delusion, an electronic Tower of Babel? Is virtual reality an escapist opium for blocking the pain of planetary loss? Many of the metaphors we use today for computers suggest escapism. The “net” and the “web” are metaphors. We can be caught by these metaphors if we’re not careful.

Info Ecology

InfoEcology is a hybrid name for a hybrid growth. The word refers to grafting information systems onto planetary health. As a sample of virtual realism, InfoEcology mixes high technology with the pragmatic maintenance of finite creatures. InfoEcology shows how permeable the fences have become between logical systems and survival anxieties. If the fences between fine arts and software engineering are falling, so too are the fences between information systems and planetary activism. The conventional barriers are proving as permeable as the graphic walls of a computerized architectural walkthrough: You push on the wall, and voilà! you are standing on the other side. Walls seem glaringly artificial today, and we acknowledge this with hybrid spellings like InfoEcology. The term was an offspring, as I recall, from the Amsterdam-based conference called “The Doors of Perception.” In January 1995, the planning session for the November 1995 third annual “Doors of Perception” conferences buzzed with the term “Info-Eco.” The plan was to bring together information theorists and ecologists from around the world. Ezio Manzini from the Domus Academy in Milan, John Thackara from England and the Netherlands Design Institute, and Willem Velthoven of Mediamatic Magazine convened the conference to bring together the “happy” information pioneers with the “worrying” ecologists. The meeting, they hoped, would inject information systems with global purpose. After the planning session, I began using the term in my own way to describe the pragmatics of information systems. Perhaps my usage was characteristically American rather than European. The predominantly European conference in Amsterdam focused its twelve workshops on social organization. They looked, for instance, at how people could cut down on the use of materials and energy by using the Internet to distribute local goods and services. My focus, on the other hand, turned to technological tools as they transform the engineers’ approach to ecological disasters on American soil. The Europeans saw InfoEcology as centering on people. The American InfoEcology I describe revolves around technology as a tool for transfiguring disaster.

Interactive Design : Tunnel or Spiral

Interactivity pounds at the doors of all broadcast media. Newspapers publish daily reports about cyberspace, then invite readers to subscribe to their online news services. Television programs encourage on-air feedback via email. Movies and popular television shows maintain viewer newsgroups and offer World Wide Web sites with click-on audio and video. As the era of one-way messages fades, the tone of unilateral broadcasting sinks to the trashy low-end of media culture. Quality switches from the TV remote controls to the computer console. Programming ceases to be unilateral when interactivity arrives. Digital switching is, of course, under the hood of interactivity. The computer establishes a reciprocal relationship between sender and receiver, viewer and producer. Because computers handle high-speed transmission to-and-fro, the separating line between sender and receiver, viewer and producer, begins to blur. The digital switch converts text, sounds, and video to transmissible bits. And bits produce incoherent fragments that are hardly distinguishable from cultural noise. The blast of information shatters what remains of cultural coherence in the wobbling worlds of print and film distribution. The digital era splatters attention spans till the shared sensibility dribbles into fragmentary, disintegrative de-construction. Interactivity signals a process of reconstruction. The digital Humpty-Dumpty needs mending. Reconstruction is a process of designing wholes, virtual worlds, that are both received and actively assembled —full, rich experiential places fit for human habitation. From the bits of the digital era arises the holism of virtual design. Virtual design means building worlds from digital fragments, engineering usable software environments from disparate information sources. Worlds are not simply re-packaged fragments. Nor do virtual worlds re-present the primary physical world. What emerges are new functional wholes, habitats that emulate the engagement of real worlds. Software engineering and software architecture support these virtual worlds, but artists with traditional skills must play a pivotal role in their construction. Virtual architecture must go well beyond wire-frame models set in clean Cartesian coordinates. Polygons in Renaissance perspective are only the first steps of interactive design. Worlds require mood-tuned scenarios that draw on traditional artistic insights.