I found this over at Bruce Sterling’s Beyond The Beyond blog and it’s pretty cool shit. Kevin Slavin runs a company called Area/Code and they design cool games that they used to consider were beyond our regular television viewing experience. Here he gives a talk at the 5D: The Future Of Immersive Design conference.
The 5D Conference describes themselves thusly:
From the plasma screen in your media room, to the portable device in your pocket, to the side of a high-rise in Manhattan, savvy broadcasters are creating comprehensive “ecosystems”…, blending television, web, movies and gaming to redefine the experience of television. This panel explores the intersection of design and technology in the creation of “new television”, the experience… created by the blending of media and the interaction of the consumer.
You can watch more videos from 5D here and they’re worth sitting still for cuz these folks are smart and really know how to fuck with your head in creative ways.
All of this falls into the kind of queries Jill Golick, myself and many others have been making as we attempt our self-evolution from the dying existing television industry into the current realms of ubiquitous and immersive digital media.
We keep forgetting that the new shit that is coming down the pipe - if you’ll pardon the sewage analogy, although we are talking about television - is cannot be defined by the old shit that has already gone on before.
It is different shit.
What Slavin points out - admitting his own surprize at the revelation of it - is that television at its best is a mass event in real time. The future of television in that context - with all the new tech at hand - is very exciting.
The blending of gaming and information tech and the ubiquity of mobile devices is going to supplant the existing passive viewer paradigm of the old television industry and replace it with - who the fuck knows? You’ll read a lot of reports these days about how television is adapting to meet and succeed within the changes that are being wrought by the disruptive tech of the net. I consider most of that to be mere whistling in the dark by the old media. Yes, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, there will always be a place for linear narrative within these emerging models - there will always be mass audience real-time events - but they will be so distorted by the emerging differences that it will be nigh impossible to compare them directly to anything that has gone before.
The old guard of the media industries are desperate eager to find a new business model that will ensure they maintain their assumed role of authority, power and profit over the exploitation of culture as product. The ones who will succeed are those who realize that everything changes and never has it been changing so quickly and so profoundly as it is these days. I’m sure previous generations though the same thing about their own times but Jesus H. Tap-Dancin’ Christ we’re living in a Buck Rogers future today folks! You think for a second that just because someone holds the purse strings they’re gonna stop this rampant cascade of human and technological evolution and innovation? Do you really think anyone is going to be able to find, let alone control, the reins of the net and be able to steer it back into a complacent feeding tube for a docile public? Do you really think the internet is going to end up being just like television?
I sure as shit don’t.
A lot of very powerful and aggressively motivated people want that and are prepared to do everything they can to ensure the outcome they desire. But it ain’t gonna happen. To mix a few metaphors: the dam has burst, the genie is out of the bottle, the horse is out of the barn, Elvis has left the building and that semi-apocalyptic vision of the King, brandishing a Djinn in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other whilst riding a horse acrest a wave that is bearing down upon us all not only gives me the shivers - it gives me hope.
It’s too late to go back - and we can’t force the future to be anything like the good ol’ days.
it just ain’t gonna happen.
I’m always fond of quoting Mark Twain who once said: “History doesn’t repeat itself - but it does rhyme.” The corollary to that is the future will not imitate the past - but it will change us.
It will be different - and so will we.
Get used to it.
Embrace it.
Cheers.
Tags: 5D, area code, beyond the beyond, bruce sterling, buck rogers, culture, future, games, has anybody seen Up yet?, I sit down to write a quick short post and then it turns into a rant that ends up only expressing a portion of what's in my alleged mind and then the whole fucking afternoon is shot, jesus h tap dancin christ, kevin slavin, mark twain, new media, old media, something is burning on the stove so I gotta dash now, television, Vimeo
LOL - I had that happen. Walked into the Apple store, and they took one off the shelf. No questions asked.
Legendary service. Legendary piece of crap cord design.
Legendary - yes. They have NEVER had a power adapter that worked well or lasted. I almost always ended up buying something from Kensington to replace the Apple version.
Unfortunately this time there seems to be a run on these things. No third party alternative and everyone’s adapter seems to have kaffed out at the same time - like the light bulbs in our house. NO ONE in the city has any. Not even the Apple store. All I could get from anybody was empathetic shrugs.
I’m writing this now on my old PowerBook G4 - which is clinging to life by its fingernails. Every once in a while the screen decides to go ape shit and put on a 60’s light show with shredded fractal screams of colour - or it just stalls and sits there - taunting me with that fucking spinning beach ball of death - and then later, whenever it feels like it, pops back to life like nothing was wrong. The battery is dea and the power adapter for it is held together with an unholy combination of electrical tape, paperclips and a hollowed out cap from one of those small traveller tubes of toothpaste you get in the little cheesy toiletry puch they sometimes give you when you fly first class - it’s been a while but I hang onto that shit for nostalgia’s sake and for the inevitable MacGuyver moments like this.
I did disassemble my newer power adapter and the mag safe connector is a marvel of miniaturization — eensy weensy tiny circuit board and two teeny tiny led’s and really really really small microchips and the most microscopic of blobs of solder you’ve ever seen. I got it working again - for about 3 minutes - and then it snapped, crackled and popped again and I thought I’d best leave it alone instead of risking frying my entire machine.
This old clunker I’m on at the moment is painful to use because the fan inside churns away and sounds like a jet engine - with shredded metal inside - and a chorus of fingernails dragging down a chalkboard - riding sonic waves that are constantly irritating and pulsingly piercing - the sort of shit that makes a dog long for ill treatment in Guantanamo - and then it ramps up to an even higher pitch, just to let you know it’s doing its best to completely fuck you in the middle of your skull. This is the kind of tortuous sound that penetrates even my full enclosure ear phones with the Ramones playing at full blast. This machine is really only suitable for use as a BitTorrent downloader - with the office door closed - and me on the other side of the city.
You said in your Facebook message to me ted that you had a spare.
A SPARE!!??!!
I am going over to your house now. I will gnaw through the bricks to get at it. I can’t wait for a 3 week online back ordered delivery. I neeeeeeed it.
I’m going to post this whole repsonse as a blog post now.
Cheers.
[...] My previous post was just a blatherskyte rant of raging furious frustration compounded by the fact the computer it was written on kept snapping itself off without warning. I’m better now. More calm. But still just as relentlessly outrageously screamingly fire breathing and acid spittingly pissed off with Apple now as I was then. [...]
“Here’s what four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you, but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”
I really hope a certain Canadian corporation figures this out. And fast.