(no subject)
The seeds for an expansive, audiovisual “virtual reality” were sown in the poetic fantasies of Homer and reached a pre-Holodeck epiphany with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
If we are familiar with this story, we remember Alice sitting dreamily on the bank, wondering whether or not to construct a daisy chain, when suddenly she sees a white rabbit with pink eyes running past her. Surprised by the fact that the rabbit is talking to himself, Alice is drawn to follow. In a turn of phrase in the first paragraph of a remarkable fantasy adventure, Carroll manages to invert reality, allowing us to race (with Alice) across the field after the white rabbit, to watch as it disappears down a rabbit hole, and (on the heels of Alice) to follow after. Would that our browsers of today would offer such an enticing invitation!
In synthetic narrative reality, the metaphor of the journey takes on added nuance as we are asked to navigate our own path through story space. As we “pop down the rabbit hole” into the storyscape of the future, reality and fiction merge and blur. The incorporation engine and cognitive processes-triggering a sensor, decoding media segments, constructing messages-are mapped against a represented reality of place, character, and action in order to fully engage us in an infinite, transformational landscape that is metaphorically understandable
this is why i want to go to mit
read this crazy shit
ic.media.mit.edu/.../ Journals/Synergistic/HTML/