Piers Palmer
Virtual bleed
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one to suffer from a condition that appears to be affecting my general perception of reality; a condition akin to one of the super-mutants in ‘Heroes’ slowly becoming aware of their latent powers.
Increasingly spending up to 12 hours a day interacting with software over a 20 year period is finally coming to a head as my virtual capabilities begin to bleed through to that other ‘hinterland’ of reality – meatspace (or as any flesh-jock may short-sightedly call it, the real world’).
This brave new world beckons and I’m ready to jump in.
I guess it started out with the familiar pattern of applying the celebrated shortcut CNTRL-Z (undo). Whilst working in Photoshop, I would try something out, not like it, undo and try again, repeating this pattern until I was satisfied. This would often mean hundreds of ‘undoes’ an hour, thousands over a week and millions over a number of years. This alchemical ability to ‘juggle the forms of everyday life’ with no consequence has begun to bleed through to the ‘real world’. I drop a pen, a synaptic neuron fires a CNTRL-Z event and my pen is expected to instantaneously appear back in my hand. A rosy apple in the fruit bowl shines attractively and a CNTRL-X event is fired. My car keys have moved from where I carefully placed them this morning, a search event activates.
‘Static’ objects glint, offering hidden interfaces and occult geometries of interaction. My dirty dinner plate almost reveals the ‘re-format’ button and the page corners of my magazine quiver in anticipation of auto-curl. A true convergence is happening and I can’t wait.
Tags: reality, virtual, ontology
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