Between the glass

I have been re-reading Manovich's Language of New Media -- it is still a great book. It's a year later and I have had some time to consider some aspects of what he has to say.

In our presentation in August, my buddy Alan Foley and I talked about DE Edcucation and the challenges/opportunities when we consider online education's potential to be better than, not just as good as -- conventional education. I have said enough on this point. But the message that we repeated is that in moving to the digital -- it is different in many ways.

I guess, now that I have spent so much time in the the digital, I am ready to revisit the analog. A friend and I were talking about graphic design, and I told him that designers "had to get down with their bad selves" -- it is about honesty, directness, clarity.

But l need to take the same advice.

What I mean is that it is time to consider the analog. I am interested in that space between the analog and the digital. Digital is....well read Manovich's book. I get stuck on terms like "sampling error" and "quantization". In converting the analog to the digital, it becomes something else. In that moment where whatever is between the two worlds, that is an interesting place.

I am back to where I was several years ago, dissatisfied with technology, and what we have chosen to do with it. A virual world run by one company, with a fake, consumerist, capitalist hype machine. So many messy questions here not answered.

Resolution. We are built for large movements, but we type on little keyboards just as I am doing right now. We are fortunately good at adapting to the things we make, but that does not mean it is ideal. We celebrate frames per second, color depth, but it still digital. It is sampled.

Between the glass lies the phosphors or lcd pixels that are activated -- by an electron beam or an electrical charge. That space is where the patterns reemerge, are stitched together by our brains. The digital is dead until we give it life.