Reignited Interests
After taking a day to really absorb the Metahaven content, I feel a reignited fire underneath towards an old love of mine, Dystopian, Tech-Based, and Reality bending futures and those who still make content for it, as well as those who gave it up and moved on.
In the past, before life got busy and I was swept up into my career and being an adult, I used to heavily ingest content related to ideas like futurism, existentialism, and our place on earth under a machine for content. I think that over time, my interests towards these topics slowly started to fade as I shifted more towards worrying about reality and the now. I think that the rising tensions and conflict in the world caused my perspective to shift as I radicalized in one direction, and I left these interesting commentaries on the future and our current state as humanity behind.
Both those topics and my recent history with reading books and watching content on socialism, Marxism, politics, etc. mixed with the happenings of the world. A lot of that content for example is a commentary on modernism and our place as beings in a post-industrialist late-stage capitalist society. I remember when watching videos on simulation theory, reading about virtual reality, thinking about philosophy, and learning about the world was fascinating to me.
At some point along the track when my perspectives shifted, it wasn’t as if I didn't enjoy those topics anymore, but I had so much going on that coming home I would turn my brain off and fall into the doom-scrolling/gaming rabbit hole.
In this moment I sit and wonder…
Where has all of my creativity went?
When was the last time I felt interested in a project I’ve done?
Did I start making design work simply for sake of career and capital?
What can I do to reclaim my self interests and personality in my work?
How can I still work for myself, but within a society that demands your labor to survive?
To pursue these thoughts, I went back in time and rewatched the video essays that I loved around the time I started really getting into it; DisruptReality, which I thought about because of the somewhat similar aesthetic they had to the Metahaven project. What was interesting about diving into this rabbit hole is the sensation of “Wow, he’s talking about technology that I’m using now, and that was only 5 years ago!”, which was an experience I haven’t had since first reading author Philip Zhai’s “Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality.” The video speaks of haptic suits, treadmills, wireless VR, etc. that people can now go out and purchase and actually tangibly use! (although for a rather large price)
HYPER=REALITY, 2017 by Keiichi Matsuda
It’s really interesting watching and interacting with these conceptual ideas of where the “Metaverse” is going and how technology will further implement with our species. It makes me think a lot about Heather Snyder Quinn’s idea if “Design Futures”, the speculative idea of creating artificial futures using design as a medium and storyteller. When I looked back at these videos with the lens of art rather than just experiencing them as content, I gained a new insight into a possible path of something I could enjoy or explore myself. Could this mixture of design futures with a spice of content creation in a multi-media format be the language I could use to express my own interests?
On another note, the Disrupt channels content had a lot of interesting aesthetics and type from a design and art perspective. I collected a few snippets of the interesting look they created for their videos.
