The Artist Is Present

My Dream Machine alarm clock went haywire. In the middle of the night it spontaneously switched on, max volume, blaring static noise. I unplugged it and returned to sleep. In the morning, at the set hour, my Jensen alarm clock powered on the radio, WHRB, and the Hillbilly at Harvard played the song, “Barnacle Bill the Sailor.” The lyrics wandered into my waking imaginings… “Who’s that knocking at my door? Who’s that knocking at my door? It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.” A few days later I drifted off on the singing sands of Singing Beach, in Manchester by the Sea. I had braved the April ocean, catching waves until a lifesaving golden retriever lifted me out of the surf by the scruff of my neck, and hauled me on shore. When I opened my eyes the ocean’s edge had crept closer and my skin was burning.

Lifestreams and the dimensions of the internet, from an essay by David Gelernter, titled The Future Beyond the iPad: “The iPad is mainly an Internet device, and we’re still seeing the Internet the wrong way. The ongoing proliferation of lifestreams (in the form of event streams, feeds, RSS updates, Twitter streams and so on) makes it clear that the Internet is mainly for telling us what’s happening now, what just happened, what’s about to happen and so on.

The classical Web site is static but a lifestream flows, at the speed of time. New material arrives constantly. Nowadays lifestreams are mainly displayed in the form of lists.

But when Eric Freeman and I invented lifestreams in the mid-’90s, we designed a 3D display in which the past flowed into the depths of the screen; the future hovered in front of the screen. The plane of the screen itself showed you now.

This sort of display makes efficient use of screen-space by using a foreshortened perspective view, and by making the screen a transparent viewport you look through, instead of an opaque surface to look at.

The iPad is designed as a traditional opaque surface. Touch-screens will be useful for stream-handling, but they’ll be optimized to a different set of finger-motions.”

The title for this post taken using a set of finger motions from the Marina Abramović MoMA exhibition of the same name.