“postsymbolic communication”

Now, as we enter the tenth dimension, we have to imagine all the possible branches for all the possible timelines of all the possible universes and treat that as a single point in the tenth dimension..

Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Your head will hurt afterwards (mine does), but it’s really a fascinating theoretical-physics presentation.

I don’t know exactly when or how the thought came into my mind but this morning the epiphany was there: wouldn’t it be cool to see Gmail’s half MB Javascript source¹ a la matrix code view^IY? Indeed it would, and so for the next half hour I became a man posessed. It was amazingly easy (“ya sabiendo es facil”) to hack it up in JS and it makes for an interesting screensaver.

When I finished I realized it would be really easy to make my makeshift Matrix code generic and so here’s a quick stab at it. Type whatever text you want matrixified and a new window will (hopefully) popup with it. (Though be warned, it’s pretty rough, unpolished code and it’ll surely be too slow if you don’t have a fast computer.) Anyway, enjoy.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.

Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.

Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.com^WHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. Domburi^WP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad Thai^WP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).

The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,

seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,

I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.

But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:

Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)

End of 1st Week—5 August

End of 2nd Week—12 August

End of 3rd Week—19 August

End of 4th Week—23 August

Tentative Finish—29 August

End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September

The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.

Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.

End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September

Start of Project Maki!—10 September

As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)

Oh please, please—I’m begging you here—go do yourself a favor and buy Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture this very moment. Please. Please.

I’ve been rereading my hilites from it, searching for an elusive quote and I’m just shocked again at how good this book is. I have no doubt whatsoever this will be a canon book from the late twentieth century. Don’t be fooled by the 3.5 stars in Amazon, it’s simply a 1997 book that’s still ahead of its time.

Johnson is lucid to (and over) the brink of genius when he talks about interface, technology, media, computers, the web, blogs (which he predicts 10 years ago), hypertext, novels, software, online communities, artificial intelligence, culture, design, agents, TV, life, the universe, and everything.

Being his first book, written in his late twenties, it is full of youthful passion, exhuberance, and raw virtuosity—but, get this, he is right.

There have been many boy-is-this-comic-good moments amid my reading of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman^WP: the convention of serial killers (with panels, keynote speakers, chit chat—the whole shebang); the 100-year meetings of Dream and Hob (a mortal who simply doesn’t believe in death; “death’s a mug’s game” were his words); the utterly disturbing cafeteria slaughter; the prisoner muse Calliope (to draw inspiration from her, one has to, “naturally”, rape her)... but the very first one was Dream’s stand-up-comedy-esque fight in hell for his helmet:

Oh, I just love those Oriental parables ridiculing symbolic communication. This was a new one for me (read it with Jorge Wagensberg’s aphorism in mind: “To compress is to comprehend”):

Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.

I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:

He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)

But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.

I don’t think it needs much context but this conversation takes place inside some sort of virtual reality where dozens of people are voluntary trapped watching an endless film. A favorite quote of mine. I had to transcribe it myself because it’s nowhere to be found around the web. Weird, that.

Amen.

Good ole Tetris is a wonderful example of those possibilities, of that unreality, and so is Photoshop. For a more recent, fascinating example look no further than the Namekuji game (but be warned, by clicking this link you therewith relinquish the next couple of hours).