"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

May 25, 2013

Gnosis

I wonder if, once the technology becomes pervasive enough to be affordable to the new emerging middle class of corporate technicians*, the next wave of "innovation" and art will be re-imagining real space with user-created overlays. I wonder, also, how it will function to separate out those who can afford to script their environments with self-generated, customized and licensed overlay from those who must live in a merely meat space.

* - and the support system monetized enough to allow for "creative play."

11 comments:

davidly said...

Best case scenario, I reckon, is enabling the former through personalized settings the most effective means at ignoring the latter, and this comfy partition might provide meatspace dwellers the ability to be exploited through less direct contact, indeed, perhaps without knowing they're being exploited at all.

The more things change...

Jack Crow said...

I was thinking about his in relation to China Mieville's "The City and the City," Davidly. I think you're on to something, here. The new tool allows people to un-see.

davidly said...

Oh. I see.

The Red Queen said...

HAAAAA, so this ridiculous little podcast that the boyfriend and I are doing that has fuck all to do with seriousness is talking about augmented reality this week. One of the questions I wrote for interviewees is something like "you are a broke ass recent college grad with massive student loans and nothing but crappy, stained hand me down furniture in a super shitty apartment. Do you use augmented reality to trick your brain into seeing your apartment as better than it is, or do you suffer with reality in the hopes that someday you can afford better?"

Isn't this shit like, the ultimate placebo. I think they will want to get it to the masses as fast as possible. I think that it's one more way to placate the have nots into thinking they have something, when it's all just pixels.

Jack Crow said...

RQ,

I wasn't looking at it as an all-access to even greater Spectacle enchantment, because these things always tend to be tiered, but you're right. It can be tiered and ranked according to status, and still be made widely available (like cable, or restaurants, or anything else really) in exactly the manner you describe.

fish said...

Gibson wrote the generally enjoyable Spook Country which has locative art as one of the threads of the book.

tsisageya said...

Please. Why do you wonder about these things at this late date. Have you no knowledge of Jerry Mander and the Four Arguments?

Don't answer. Strictly rhetorical.

tsisageya said...

He also wrote, "In the Absence of the Sacred" blahblahblah Native American blahblahblah.

But I'm sure no one will be interested.

tsisageya said...

In the meantime we're all standing on stolen ground. Awesome.

Jack Crow said...

Don't know what arguments against television have to do with user created overlays, as apps, for digitally enhanced "living."

tsisageya said...

Really? You don't know what un-debated technology has to do with un-debated technology?

You don't know much, do you?

(Oh wait, is that irony or something?)