Let there be digital light
It was at the beginning of this century when the long-predicted digital convergence coalesced.
Not so much the singularity as the impossible tangle of wires and electricity and code and bits refracting through the air, through the ether.
All expression - visual, textual, audio, video, you name it - has moved to the machine world, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is no less real than our physical reality.
And that is not a metaphorical equivalence. It is now our reality. (What happens when the sunset on a digital billboard burns brighter than the supposedly real thing? When the digital supersedes the parameters of the natural world? When it exceeds biological constraints? When reality is set free?)
Alvy Ray Smith calls this digital light. It’s what we’re bathed in every day when we’re not in the middle of a forest or surfing a wave.
Digital light is going to become more electric, more illuminating, more present.
More all-knowing.