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| Jaron Lanier |
Paul Saffo
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"When we get a century or so into this revolution,
Jaron Lanier is going to prove to be one of the most prominent, deep thinkers. As
brilliant as Jaron is, we only have a vague glimpse that there's somebody very
special in our midst. This is an intelligence that comes once in a generation.
It's not an exaggeration to say it's a little bit like meeting a Mozart."
Paul Saffo |
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Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and author, but best known for his work in virtual reality, a term he coined. Jaron co-invented fundamental VR components such as interface gloves and VR networking, and was the first to propose and implement a variety of technologies that have since spawned industries in their own right. Jaron's love for virtual reality stems from the notion that computers could provide a way for people to share their imaginations in new ways. He seeks to create a world that is "fully objective like the physical world but also completely fluid like the imagination." While his work as a computer scientist has garnered him wide recognition,
music is Lanier's first love. He has been an active composer and performer in the
world of new classical music since the late seventies. "Musical instruments have
often been the most advanced technologies around, sometimes surpassing even the
tools of war... As the most eloquent machines, instruments predict the future of
culture, when we will communicate increasingly through machines." |
| NEW MEDIA MINDS VISION | |
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NEW TECHNOLOGY has, throughout history, forced us to re-examine our own
humanity. Yet, never before has technology changed so rapidly nor made such an
instantaneous impact on culture. The speed, depth and sheer breadth of
information invading our senses daily is enormously disorienting. This generates
subtle changes in the foundations of what we perceive as real and true. Our media
seeks to captivate us by surrounding us with compelling visions designed to
attract and then maintain our attention. Yet at the same time, with these new
media we see the possibility for new freedom. Our expanding technologies have
given us the ability to interact so deeply with the diversity of the world, that
a profound new window into our own soul has opened. Nevertheless, in order to
regain our peripheral vision we need some sort of center to grasp.
The great promise and challenge of new media lies in the evolution of our sense of identity and community. To understand how we can exist on many levels is to understand how to recapture some of our coherence. To form global electronic communities around common interests is to form new ways of uncovering meaning and understanding. In this forum we step back from our manic attention to the means and look at the ways in which we intend to employ these tools -- from a humanistic perspective -- to step back from the insane speed to explore WHO OR WHAT WE ARE BECOMING? Jaron Lanier is the perfect person to launch us on this journey. When you listen to Jaron speak for any length of time, it becomes immediately apparent just how committed he is to solving "the language problem" -- that is, the limitations of symbolic thought in the expression of human feeling. Understandably, the way he frames the problem and his work toward a solution, is inspired by his passion for music. This also explains his early work in defining virtual reality. |
In a Whole Earth interview in 1988 he said, "There's simply no
need for one unified paradigm for experiencing the physical world, and there's no
need for one in Virtual Reality either...Now the reason that the whole thing
works is that your brain spends a great deal of its efforts on making you believe
that you're in a consistent reality in the first place. What you are able to
perceive of the physical world is actually very fragmentary and a lot of what
your nervous system accomplishes is covering up the gaps in your perception."
It is precisely this fragmentation that engenders our feelings of disorientation. Our mind can't quite keep up with the flow of data it is receiving. Our focus and attention are caught up in the compelling visions our media makers are driven to design. We are beginning to see these gaps more and more often and it frightens us. It seems our art of making meaning, or of identifying recognizable patterns, is in disarray, as is our notion of self. Last year in an interview with Live Feed, Jaron said, "I think of our time in history as being a very important one that will have an enormous influence on the future. I think we are in the process of figuring out what the future of humanism is. This is a critical time in deciding what our definition of ourselves is and how technology figures into our definition of ourselves. In the coming decade we'll be facing issues such as whether human beings are actually information devices, or creatures of divine origins or various other possibilities -- questions which haven't been considered before." mark beam
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