The digital backlash and the rise of the physidigital world
How analog suddenly became
cutting edge
Despite being a dozen or so years younger than me, my 25 year
old friend Adam and I share a surprising number of technological touchstones.
He’s a part-time DJ who only plays vinyl 45s and owns (and actually uses!) a
typewriter.
Adam’s predilection for analog media might sound anachronistic,
or even sadly unhip, but instead his anti-digital tendencies now put him on the
cutting edge of a contemporary subculture.
Everyone is familiar with the rude snub fans can give their
favourite band when they become too mainstream. In the same way, a small but
growing number of artists and culture mavens have begun expressing their frustrations
with the digitization of everything.
The fancy term for music, books and photographs being
converted into zeros and ones is "dematerialization." Spotify might be a
tremendous service for music fans but try impressing someone with a record shelf
full of cloud storage. For anyone who has lost a hard drive’s worth of photos
or MP3s the limitations of a world where art and culture are no longer anchored
to a physical object are clear.
To escape this binary trap in December 2010, during my
residency at the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, I began researching the
emerging shift toward rematerialization. I discovered a company that prints posters
of your Tumblr followers (socialprintstudio.com) and
another that can publish a book of your favourite Tweets (tweetbookz.com).
Even the high priestess of low culture, Lady Gaga, noted last year that her new
Polaroid mobile printer would ensure that precious images “will no longer die a
death on your cell phone or digital camera”.
Drawing inspiration from these and other examples, my team
at the CFC decided to create a physical manifestation of a digital experience. What
began as drinking straws in a cardboard box eventually turned into a prototype
for txt2hold, a service that debuted in May 2011 at Maker Faire Toronto. Txt2hold
takes any text message forwarded to our system and incorporates it into a
unique paper sculpture. Or, to be more precise, an origami pyramid that’s
colour coded according to the emotional content of the text, thanks to the
assistance of a sentiment analyzer called Lymbix. The idea proved so popular that
for Nuit Blanche 2011 our team was asked to create a modified version of the
system that converted Twitter @replies into paper birds.
Since then, I’ve seen numerous rematerialization projects, including
BERG’s upcoming Little Printer (bergcloud.com/littleprinter) and a hacked
telegraph called Tworsekey that can send Tweets via Morse code.
This does not mean, however, that the 21st
century will be predominantly Amish, even if a Portlandia sketch joked -
“Remember when kids grew up to be artisan bakers and everyone had homemade
haircuts and guys shaved with straight razors?” - that the latest hipster craze
involves a return to the 1890s. Instead, the future will be neither purely digital
nor analog, but a messy hybrid of the two. And to acknowledge the awkwardness of
this fusing of the past and the present I’ve created a gloriously clunky
neologism: “physidigital."
Novelist William Gibson famously observed that the future is
already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The past, meanwhile, remains
everywhere, and we shouldn’t be afraid to get physidigital by jamming a USB
drive into an old cassette tape.
Even Adam, alongside his typewriter, owns an Android phone
that allows him to remotely download and launch a torrent file on his home
computer. He might be technologically eccentric, but that doesn’t mean he’s crazy
enough to abandon all modern conveniences.
