A thread in the labyrinth
The following accompanies this week’s ‘Indoor Kids’ newsletter. You can find all the current listings at the Now Playing: Immersive For Indoor Kids page.
For the better part of a generation, we’ve lived two lives without really recognizing it: the digital and the physical. Maybe “without recognizing it” isn’t the right words. More like: without being willing to admit it.
The back end of the 2010’s showed what happened when those two worlds, and the identities we presented in each, bled into each other. As it turns out, the digital universe can manipulate the physical universe with as much force as the later does the former. Creating feedback loops that lead us… well that led us here.
Now the balance is tipped. Cultural production, already shifting towards the digital, is for the moment limited to that realm. Concert tours are happening in Fortnite, at-home movie screenings are arranged by theater chains, and in our realm everybody is using Zoom.
I hate Zoom. Have for years. That’s a personal thing. One too many Monday meetings. Soul drained out to start the week in an artificial social space where you’re just a face on TV. Forced into a performance.
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But right now everything really is a nail, and we’ve got this one hammer. Only so much of our lives are playing out in video chat so quickly that I wonder if all of you will reach their limit with Zoom and it’s ilk faster than I did. I’ve heard of people going to funerals on Zoom. How long until the psychic weight of all that’s happened on livestream makes the medium almost unbearable to use?
It’s not like TV because it is inherently interactive, and if all your interactions are negative…
Which is why it’s so heartening to see creators exploring their options. That people are embracing the idea of what we might call “action recipes”: scripts for the audience to follow to produce a physical effect.
I’m not entirely sure what to call all this yet, and as I look at how we categorize things here I’m not sure if the groupings we use now will be what we use in a month. There’s often an ineffable quality to immersive work — definitely to the good stuff — that defies categorization the way mystic experiences do.
Yet at the heart of it all is the relationship between the creator and the audience. The thing made in the friction that happens as two minds aim to bring forth a shared reality. Which can be as mundane as a folk game or as grand as a built-up universe.
Keep that as your thread, and the current maze we find ourselves in of video platforms, transmedia activations, and experiential podplays will be far more navigable.
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