In Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Neil Cassady is portrayed as having faster reaction times than others have. All of us experience a lag due to the time it takes to actively perceive the world (from the time it takes for light or sound wave to reflect off an object and travel to us, to the time it takes our senses to register this sensory information, to the time it takes to travel through our synapses and nervous system to our brain to be processed, to the time it takes for the brain to process this information and actually understand it), resulting in our never really living in the present but rather in what I’ll call the “experiential past.” Neil’s faster than normal reactions allow him to perceive or respond more quickly than others. He actually experiences a future that others could have not yet perceived,1 but the infinitesimal lag between the actual present and the experiential past is a gap that none of us can overcome. What I found when I first read this novel and continue to find fascinating about this idea is the notion that Neil was attempting to see a “future” that others were unable yet to see and that our present is yet history.

Through differentiating between ideas for the future and those for the present and the past, the connotation of the conference’s theme seems to get at the frenetic drive of Neil Cassady’s character. The future, an unobtainable ideal, is never actually experienced – when tomorrow comes it’s today – and on an experiential level the only reality we know is an ephemeral present that we think we are experiencing yet is actually located in the experiential past due to the above mentioned physiological lag in perceiving and processing information.

As an academic, I’m comfortable with this “experiential past” as, like many other academic disciplines, most of my work seems to concern itself with critiquing an artifact. In focusing on an artifact, the work of criticism neither focuses on the future nor really on the present, but on the past and is by its nature just as much an historical artifact as the artifact itself. I’m sure that exceptions exist in fields in which practitioners and scholars attempt to predict outcomes based on hypotheses – but though they predict – an act by its nature focused forward on the future – what they usually measure is in the past. The future, an unobtainable goal, always slips out of reach and the past dominates our work and our understanding of the future – and the present. The past lives in memory, record, artifact, and effect.

Yet what complicates my idea of an unobtainable future is that designing for interactivity (in all of its degrees and guises – be they in business, services, manufacturing, public policy, or digital settings) requires understanding, predicting, and then designing and developing potential actions/interactions. Granted, to create a technology or an object is ironically an historic act. The potential interactions and influence held by such creations – the fact that people may one day interact with these creations in the future – when this interaction is realized – is always in the experiential past. However here I find an idea that is particularly relevant to the conference theme – ideas for the future – for designing interactivity is forward looking, even though the artifacts created are in the experiential past. It’s not really that we interact with or experience the future, but that we plan for these future interactions.

Because we are at play in the fields that comprise digital media and arts – or training those who will take part – we are in a position to design and develop future interactions. And while in some ways the notion of influencing or building the future is patently absurd – who doesn’t build or plan for the future? – iDMAa’s constituents are in many ways at the center of both a grand act of understanding what it is that we’re doing with digital media and arts and a reimagining and building of a future based on what we’ve come to know about digital media and art. We’re in a good place to understand what has happened and shape what is to come.

The art described in Eber’s article or Cliquet’s idea of datatainment both detail historical phenomena, yet these historical documents may in some small way allow us to imagine or predict better what might yet be. Petite, Dinh, and Fisher’s article “Towards a Transmedia Search Engine: A User Study on Perceiving Analogies in Multimedia Data” illustrates their movement toward refining search engines that extend beyond textual and metadata searches and constitutes a vastly different way in which data on the internet can be used. O’Neil’s paper on “Remix Identity” “interprets the superabundance of video mash-ups (the remixed/repurposed media creations that have made YouTube iconic) as a generational, aesthetic response to identity crisis.” George-Palilonis, et al, document their past struggles with teaching students how to create new interface designs for delivering news to mobile phones in their paper “Research Informed Design.” Nyhoff’s paper “Performing the Interface” expands upon historical discussions of the theatricality of the graphical user interface. And Burg, et al, detail ways in which educators might better incorporate sound into digital media courses. All of these papers deal with past patterns, trends, objects, or ideas, yet all can help us better chart out our own future interactions, ideas, and projects.

In a world defined by rapid change, like the odd figure of Neil Cassady we need to reduce the lag in how quickly we understand and react to this change. For those curmudgeons out there, we actually can learn something from Beatniks and Hippies. Often we are either unable to see the pattern of changes unfolding around us or choose not to question the paradigms of our world, yet all of us would agree that we have to understand the past and see beyond paradigmatic thinking in order to understand what is actually happening and successfully plan for the future. I trust that you might think, as I do, that the annual iDMAa conference and these conference proceedings can provide us with the means of readily understanding both what has occurred and what might yet.

Footnotes:

1. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (New York: Bantam, 1981), 129.

Works Cited:

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1981.