I was very excited when computer video projections first entered into the theater … in the late 80s and into the 90s.
There was a fellow in SF who did absolutely amazing work with video projections and with racks of slide projectors. It was beautiful work and it always included astonishing music and singing and acting. It was magic.
Jump forward 20 years and you have these immersive Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo shows and they’re just a bunch of projections in an empty space … there are no real things.
Of course, video gets used everywhere now because it’s so cheap. You don’t have to build real sets … you can just use empty space or even foamcore. But every step along that path leads to more virtual experience and less full spectrum sensory experience.
And now you’ve got Oculus and all the different kinds of virtual reality headsets. The resolution may be high, but the experience is still narrow and overtly entraining.
I stuck my head in one of the first virtual reality headrests in the late 80s … and it was exciting and fun to think about what that could mean, but from the first, the experience was so limited to a narrow range of visual experience - that it felt dumb and clunky.
There was a guy I used to work with for shows who had built a Rube Goldberg VR. He had a pro hairdressers dryer and you sat under it and there was a fan that blew peanut butter smells at you and a Viewmaster thing that you looked through and cheesy music that you listened to … and the whole thing was funny.
What the fuck happened to funny?
If I could characterize the last 2+ years in three words, they would be … “That’s not funny.“ No, it’s not. Klaus Schwab is not funny. He’s a fucking sadist. Joe Biden has all the makings of funny, as he’s had his brains carved out … but because the world’s had its sense of humor heisted, even the Biden-bot "projection” gets taken seriously too.
Everything got serious, because everyone was made scared. That’s the original sin of COVID-1984. We took that stupid shit for real.
There’s “not funny” for you — being so afraid you mistake phony stuff for real.
