Two coffees after dessert at a restaurant and I’m lying in bed unable to sleep. I haven’t actually closed my eyes; I’m just staring at the back of my eyelids trying to recognise the shifting patterns of colour delivered by my rods and cones.
An idea that I’ve been neglecting for a while pushes its way through the reds and greens and rises to the surface demanding to be heard again. It’s untested and unresolved, so a further examination seems fair, if only to be courteous. I push it around a little, first gently, then firmly. It resists. Finally I step back a few fanciful feet to try and see it in some sort of context. The true shape of this elephant begins to come into focus.
My decision to blow the dust off some old writing and reuse it in my last entry, now makes more sense to me. I talked last time of a ‘data wall’ whose shape was defined by the two functions that occurred on either side of it; one digital, one physical. Bits and shits, if you will. It struck me last night that this web log is that data wall. In a sense, the Canary Wharf project was just the concept and it’s taken me five years to plan it and get it built. Last night I handed over the keys to the new owner.
As the data field records the journey of the e[version], it’s deformation freezes the moments of contact and simultaneously implicates all others within the mesh.
Links, comments, trackbacks, quotes, image captures, visitor statistics, e-mails – causing ripples, peaks and troughs that define the topography of the surface that faces the internet.
The negative result of previous positive actions becomes the void between the data planes and forms the volume of physical living space.
Notes, ideas, sketches, photos, questions and statements form and/or inform the opposite face (their content shaped by the impressions made on the digital side). Its influence reaches out to shape the way I fight/glide through physical space.
The reconciliation of physical and digital occurs as a point of equilibrium between the tensions of opposite forces.
That point of equilibrium occurs here.
The elephant I mentioned earlier, picked me up and carried me here at a pace that allowed me to recognise everything as it passed. I would have missed a few things if he hadn’t pointed with his trunk occasionally. He tells me that he has more to show us and the really interesting bit of the story has to do with something called a koan, but it’s late now and he wants to sleep.