curl up, it’s story time!
…in which Cathi goes to visit a traditional farm, and finds she’s more comfortable as an avatar! Is her Second Life overtaking her first life? It reminds Nora of an interesting take she read at Susan Wu’s blog
Wu talks about the evolution towards Web 3D.
Meanwhile, Nora has recently become obsessed with the I Ching.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Hi Cathi & Nora
Just listened to the ‘cast about Cathi’s visit to the farm & her “hundred years in an hour” time travel experience. Very interesting.
Most people now can only get that sort of experience by deliberately going out of their way to find it - usually in some completely artificial form like a museum or a specially preserved/restored site or display (like Upper Canada Village, or the Mackenzie House museum).
Generally though (unlike the farm Cathi visited), these aren’t really intended to be functional at anything more than a “demonstrate-it-for-the-tourists” level.
I’m lucky enough (though I don’t always think of it that way) to have something like this sort of dichotomous past/future technology running in my life. I have a day job working for Xerox, wherein I have two souped-up, highspeed connected PCs on my desk, where I order high quality, machine made paper by the ton, and where I deal with various state of the art Xerox printers & technologies for our customers. After work though, I go home and indulge in my real interests - making handmade paper, which I then print on with my letterpress, using old-fashioned handset lead type. It’s not exactly Cathi’s “hundred years in an hour” rush - my presses are 40s to 60s vintage - but it’s close.
The thing that appeals to me most about this kind of artisanship/craftsmanship is the physicality of the doing of it. I know that I can use my PC or whatever other piece of technology I’ve got available to do some very cool stuff - stuff that would seem unimaginable to someone 100 or even 50 years ago. Still, when I compose a document on my screen, there seems to me to be a definite “not-really-there” quality to the thing. Even if I hit the “print” button and run off a hard copy, I have no real idea as to what has actually happened between my keyboard, my screen, and the various bits of paper that result.
When I print a poem by letterpress, in contrast, I’ve made the paper myself, set the type, inked the press, and I can see all the moving parts of the press work when I pull the lever and press the type into the paper. There’s a clarity & a simplicity here that I don’t see in quite a lot of what goes on in the rest of the world I live in.
Anyway, there are still a few folks around who appreciate this kind of craft and the physical experience that goes with it. If either of you are at all interested, one such bunch is CBBAG (the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild), of which I’m a member. We are having our annual Book Arts Fair on Saturday, June 9th. This year it’s in Toronto, at St Barnabas Church (175 Hampton Ave @ Danforth), between 11 and 4. More info on CBBAG can be found at their website: www.cbbag.ca
Cheers & thanks for the interesting perspectives,
Grant