Dynamic Research

I have been thinking a lot about visual representation and how different people often choose to represent the same experience in strikingly different ways. Choosing which details to retain and which to remove in order to communicate with more emotion or clarity. If the same object or experience can be represented in a multitude of ways, could it be possible to design an interface that allows us to slide gradually between these multiple representations and examine the subtle ways in which the message is changed?

How many times have I heard someone say “I can see it in my head but I can’t get it down on paper”? Would an elastic representation that required manipulation of variables in place of manipulation of paint, graphite or pixels give these people the tools for expression they desire? Or would it be doomed to the same fate as the early Photoshop filters which rapidly became meaningless because of the ease of use and abuse they afforded? I am not sure.

Over the weekend Elaine and I went out to a great restaurant in China Town with a gentlemen we met at the Massaging Media Conference. During the car ride to the restaurant he mentioned that he heard Jaron Lanier give a speech on cuttle fish several years back at the new england aquarium. I stumbled upon a written version of same lecture a few weeks ago in a book about science and optimism and found it to be fascinating and somehow related to my own ideas about elastic representation.

I did not buy the book, but found an extended version of the essay online. Here is an excerpt from a section that I found to be particularly interesting:

Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to think ourselves into different forms. Why would we want to? Consider the existing benefits of our ability to create sounds with our mouths. We can make new noises and mimic existing ones, spontaneously and instantaneously. But when it comes to visual communication, we are hamstrung. We can mime, and indeed when I give lectures on cephalopods I like to pretend to be the crab and the cuttlefish to illustrate the tale. (More than one student has pointed out that with my hair as it is, I am looking more and more like a cephalopod.) We can learn to draw and paint, or use computer-graphics design software. But we cannot generate images at the speed with which we can imagine them.

You can find the rest of the article here, and Jaron’s web site here.