Fast forward further into his talk – and, warning: this is where I fire up my own speculative engine – Matt talks about some work from earlier this decade that BERG did (collated in this blog post) where they investigated using “smart lamps” that could both see and project.
Pictured below is a music player that’s nothing more than pieces of wood with the simplest mechanics possible allowing a hidden glyph to be read via machine vision, formed only when the block is pushed down, visible almost exclusively in the infrared spectrum.
So you get these objects acting purely as physical artefacts, totems, for our brains to interface with via our meaty limbs and nervous system and interfact back’n’forth with a purely Cloud-based universe. Kind of exactly like the idea of the Holographic Universe. Everything is happening in an invisible dimension, the execution of our minds and remotely executed computation (for bonus points, explain the difference between those two.)
Who wants to come with me down a speculative wormhole where we use semi technomagical blocks of wood to talk about Brane Cosmology?
Which is of course the complete opposite, but also equal, form of ‘design fiction’ to rapidly prototyping the latest wearable or app through iterative advertising. Where just maybe the metafictional star of Her awaits us with a whole new set of posthuman problems.
– See more at: http://blog.m1k3y.com/?p=48736
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 