Streams of Consciousness page 2

The ultimate display?

In the well known paper `The Ultimate Display' published in the 1960s by American computer `guru' Ivan Sutherland, the following proposition is made:

"The ultimate display would be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining , and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland in which Alice walked."

herein lies a paradox: is the goal of the `ultimate' display to simulate or duplicate reality? In the search for ever higher definition and finer resolution, are we not actually starting to replace the richness of human experience with the showman's ultimately empty promise of a world `more real than reality'? Today's claims for multimedia and virtual reality are startlingly similar to Hollywood's promises for the `new technology' of the 1950s with Bwana Devil, the first 3D film, promising the cinema-goer: `"a lion in your lap, a lover in your arms"? (Haywood & Wollen, Future Visions) These tawdry promises are simply never kept.

Yet what if these bigger than life, brighter-than-white worlds could be made real? The "bullet that kills" is not a mere simulacrum; surely it is not just a simulation, but a real bullet? The distinction between being shot by a slug of lead or a 3D vector-mapped tangible projection (as no doubt the computer industry would call it) would be fairly academic to victim of either missile.

The problem with these ultimate synthetic experiences is that in being able to so effortlessly summon up both reality and fantasy the difference, the meaning and essential tension between these worlds just disappears. To reach Sutherland's goal - to "literally " walk through Alice's Wonderland means that we lose any distinction between this world and any other we may choose to invent and inhabit. It empowers us only to the same extent that the Crack cocaine addict establishes control over his life - by removing himself from it. In the plastic universe of infinite possibilities the `ultimate' display can, I believe, only offer at best a pair of rose-tinted spectacles through which not just weeds, but life itself disappear from view.

Does this view pose a problem within the scheme of the Garden? In an attempt to make it a space for everyone, will the garden's Viewers simply have to proliferate ad nauseam, not just one for each `medium', but one for every person? Do we not actually need Sutherland's display? I believe that the answer is a definite `no'. The Living Garden provides sufficient - but not unlimited - tools so that anyone who cares to may both `read' and `write' messages. Meaning is not defined by the number of pixels which we can see. Through limiting the number of Viewers within a garden - by creating constraints - the range or `meaning' of a message is not impoverished; it actually encourages a perception which amplifies meaning by making use of an ultimate display already in mass production - the human mind.