It’s a way of representing, experimenting, and applying.
That crashing wave on the split screen looks just like an ocean but it’s an accumulation, instead, of leftover sandwiches, nitrogen tubes, copper wiring, clusters of positrons, half-finished thoughts, magazine racks, brand new tennis shoes, and what appears to be the shattered remnants of an unimpressive Linux installation. Next screen over, proverbially speaking at least: twisting nanotubes wrapping themselves around each other erotically–likewise, a hodgepodge of administrative, experimental, miscellany. One more, a brand new one, it looks like. The inside of a tornado, no, more like an upward gaze in the center of steel scaffolding, but this one, too is just a dream–even when it gets twisted, screaming, as it is reforged into real steel, real bolts, the real horror and agony of hundred-ton drivers: shaking the mutilated model of Earth into pieces small enough to squeeze onto an eighteen-inch screen.
Represent, apply, experience.
It’s not all bad, though, being not all about steel guts and alchemical re-in-carnation. You can also see the uncurling petals of a thousand possible worlds, each with its own good guys and bad guys who wait with only the best intentions. It’s two steps beyond a childhood fascination with things and there. It’s only slightly beyond structures of meaning, webs of belief: not a third dimension, but an extension in a new direction. It’s right there in front, obvious and hard, but it’s transparent, a picture of elsewhere.
A rearview mirror into the future.
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