Beyond Tellerrand: Quick Notes on Physicality
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- Categories:
- Physicality, Random 7, Personal 16
- Current music:
- Veltpunch — killer smile
- Current drink:
- Hot Cocoa
I spent the whole day at the first of two days of beyond tellerrand conference in Berlin, so I did not have an opportunity to work on a proper post here.
I met many nice people! New and old faces, good talks.
I have made many notes, and have many thoughts, but wanted to just quickly jot down one of them, mostly as something that I have been thinking about for quite a while already.
That thing is — physicality.
Being someone who is staring at the pixels all day every day, I often wonder: is there something that is possible to do for me outside of the screen?
The problem is: I am kinda bad with physical stuff? My hands cannot draw, they cannot write, just the whole process of keeping physical notes is not something that I can or want to do. But I can see how being limited by the rectangle (or a few — with multiscreen setup) can be restrictive. How absence of a touch, of a feel, a texture, an ability to interact with things in real life is something I miss.
In my childhood, I used to play with LEGO a lot. In the present day (present time hahahaha), a lot of my days are spent fidgeting with any random small items I have on my work desk.
Is there anything that can be done that could fascilitate my experiments with CSS, but that would involve physical objects?
When I first learned about Dynamicland — a project by Bret Victor and some others — I was looking at it from a rather sceptical point of view. For my experiments, I am mostly working alone, the collaboration of these physical interactions is not something I need, or even want. Not everyone is comfortable working like that!
But maybe there is something that even I could find with this. Just as a way to augment the reality, but not in a digital way, but recursively, with other real things.
When Linda Liukas started the first talk of the day — about bulding an actual kids’ playground to fascilitate learning through play — I was immediately reminded of Dynamicland. And was delighted to see it mentioned on one of the slides as an inspiration.
Three other talks today also mentioned physicality in one way or another:
- Jan De Coster did talk about his robots — actual physical objects.
- Craig Black works with physical paint and uses the actual physics of acrylic paint to achieve some kind of generative art.
- Jessica Hische mentioned how she copes with the uncertainty that AI brings today by doing more things in the physical realm, with her actual shop and studio in Oakland.
Everyone is touching their own medium, and I am a bit jelous: what about me? I don’t have anything like that.
Or do I? Maybe I just did not discover it yet. Maybe, one day I would wake up, and my brain will combine some puzzle that would show me the picture of how I could do it.
Maybe, one day, I could leave the wired world, and come back to reality.