Having tangible evidence/demonstration of one’s work in a public venue inspires one (at least, me) to continue creating, such as the magic one might feel holding a printed book of their writing or a CD/vinyl of their music. “It’s real! What I made is real!” Because it is
in the world. Of course, our emails are
in the world too, but as we know, they are invisible, locked away behind the glowing rectangle and a file/folder hierarchy—for the public, the email threads on our computers may as well be buried deep inside an ancient Egyptian tomb.
Imagine if such posters, if somehow generated dynamically (so you didn’t have to print and mount it by hand), existed in truly public spaces. I am imagining the lost time standing at BART, waiting around with only advertisements or an iPhone or a book to entertain me. What if correspondences about the Dynamic Medium were displayed on the walls and I could read those threads while I waited. “Robert Ochshorn had the most magnificent and ambitious idea about building his own lenses… I just read about it waiting for the BART to Downtown Berkeley!”
BART already has a Dynamic Medium: the scrolling LED signs that announce train times and advertise things like “Take BART to the Giants game!” On the dynamic spectrum, I find these too dynamic. You can barely read more than one or two words before they disappear. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the BART maps in the trains and stations. These are routinely updated physically in a manner very similar to the poster(s) Bret just mounted at CDG. These feel far less ephemeral, and have an information/spatial “reliability” to them that the LED signs don’t.
In a public space, someone could be a jerk and email War and Peace to the thread over and over again, ruining the Dynamic Poster experience for everyone. This is the other side of the privacy coin Bret mentioned earlier. But dwelling on those things at this stage of research and development is probably prohibitive.
Another comment on the beauty and value of these semi-public Email Chambers: I have often imagined RMO’s original receipt wall behind his desk existing in my house while my own receipt wall hangs in his. Or something like that. This idea that you might become physically familiar with someone else’s research and ponderings is both fascinating and intimate. It reminds me of a grander version of the new Apple Watch personal messaging (send a heartbeat or a drawing to someone else’s wrist). Perhaps one way to think about it is like a physical manifestation of a webcam: I could have webcam view of a CDG whiteboard here in Mexico so I could feel like I was there, but what if I could have an actual wall here in Mexico with new receipts appearing hourly. In that sense, part of CDG would physically be here, with me, and that would keep me even more connected and inspired. It’s hard to believe, in fact, that all this text I’m writing will take physical Receipt form. I wonder if you all located at CDG have a different relationship with the emails you send because you are seeing them on walls, in drawers, playpens, and now posters?
Virtually,
Dave
On Apr 30, 2015, at 10:10 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
I printed out our emails again. This time as a 300-page binder.
(I foolishly forgot that paper has two sides, so there's twice as much paper as there should be. Will be fixed on next print.)
I placed the binder on a podium within the Email Chamber, and am enjoying the thought of applying RMO's Active Binder technology to this space.
I find myself thinking again of
Craig Mod's essay about turning a software development project into a book.
“What does that weigh?”
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