millsworks

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.