Key events of the thought-variety don’t tend to shuffle themselves comfortably into place on a well-organized timeline. Between that shrug (see last post) and the feedback session (I repeat), I burrowed deeper down the rabbit hole. I uncovered the story behind the founder of Oculus and his mysterious termination with Facebook that was later revealed to be on account of being a staunch Trump supporter. That’s actually putting it gently. The root of the matter pertained to a scandalous press leak about about his 10k contribution towards the funding of a billboard (yup, I mean a single billboard). The specifics of the ad in question made me, from the days of Monica Lewinski to this, want to give Hilary a neck rub, while slowly shaking my head as she knocks back a double-scotch before raising her empty tumblr into a cheers. My eyes were spared the grace of being grafted by the image, but the description sufficed to conjure a visual of Fat Bastard with the one-time First Lady and the-soon-to-be failed champion of the popular vote’s face. Yes, the founder of Oculus got fired for funding a fat joke about Hilary Clinton on a billboard.
When he then refused to endorse a libertarian candidate in an effort to save face, Zuckerberg ordered off an immediate termination and was promptly served up a 250K lawsuit for wrongful dismissal. Further digging revealed that his latest company was among seven that were picked up by a joint venture between the US military flagships, the Air Force and Space Force. If that’s not slightly alarming to you, consider that he founded Oculus at the age of 22, after spending his teenage years collecting and dissecting what might be the most robust collection of VR headsets that existed at the time. Oh, and his other hobby? Drones. Reading about this prompted a 2am text to my friend, who responded “Aside from reading about the future of warfare what have you been up too 🙂 “, then followed with this clip (from the friendly folks at Instagram’s Goodnews Movement).

I got the point. Go to bed, the world will live to see another day. But not before I made plans for my first piece. Following in accordance with my presentation’s promise to create weekly art around the topic of the Pandemic from my own perspective, I came up with this little ditty:

The reference to the pandemic may come off as a bit of a stretch, but it’s not to me. Having flown back from Florida that fateful week of mid-March (AKA the Ides of March) of 2020, I was in the first round of spring breakers to live out the two-week quarantine. It provided ample time to get weird with my homework and obsess about the world crumbling. My grad program,”Digital Futures”, might as well have been called “Judgement Day”). I was in the throws of research for a term paper which served as a preliminary exercise in exploring / researching the topic for our upcoming year of thesis projects. This presented my first real opportunity to dig into the XR (Mixed Reality) industry. I had previously done a presentation about the history of virtual reality, which I should publish in a later post because there are plenty of aspects from its early days (the 60s!) that recall the weird and wonderful worlds that were being explored at the time: real-life space travel, the debut of Star Trek and the Twilight Zone, and films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove.
That timeline presentation finished with some fanatical speculation about the future of the XR industry: virtual stores that we could visit ‘in person’ in cyborg suits, all while settled into the grooves of our living room sofa, or flying to other planets with our kids in full-body haptic suits. In all that hype, I overlooked the mark about what was actually happening in that industry right now. Like most of us these days, I’d considered VR to be a sort of gimmick that had been attempted in the late 90s and in spite of cool public exhibits – my first and only exposure to it was VR boxing at the CN tower in 1999 – quickly fell flat on its face. I’m starting to feel that where progressive technology is concerned, there’s nothing like publicly-conceived failure and mockery to ignite a well-funded fire under its inconspicuous ass.
It turns out that under the veil of more recent societal eye-rolling courtesy of Google Glass, the XR industry has been smouldering. Google itself seems somewhat unscathed by perhaps that most notorious flop, and has been busy developing an administrative desktop platform for VR since 2015. Needless to say, the more I gathered “research” for my paper, the more of these tech rabbit holes – I’m more aptly referring to them as “robot holes” from here on out – I fell into. I’ve now reached the point that I feel like Nietzsche’s mad(woman) running about town with the lantern trying to warn everyone of the precipice before us. While we continue to dismiss it as a technology that’s been struggling to make its way into our living rooms since the 90s, a concept that we have a society – and even hardcore gamers – have collectively rejected regardless of how cool the graphics have become, the wireless world that we live in is about to go XR whether we like it or not. I think that was the intention well before the Pandemic, but the world suddenly shutting down without knowing when it could reopen again was the answer to the XR industry’s prayers. I began to see the vision boards permeating the boardroom walls. Virtual Reality headsets will seem like a heroic saviour, breathing virtual air into companies that have been crushed under the fantom weight of lost office space and kids who can’t go back to school while their parents have long past the point of losing their minds.
By the time it does saturate every aspect of our lives, just like the internet or smart phones, it will be hard to imagine what the world was like without it.

In one of my earliest posts I make a comparison about entering the realm of Tilt Brush to, when at age 11, I tried scuba diving for the first time. The connections are too direct and plentiful to call even call it an analogy. Then again that might be just me: I can’t imagine not wanting to explore the world under the ocean’s surface, propelled by (with a little assistance from nitrogen and flippers) my own body. In more recent years of graduating through levels of certification of my PADI license, I’ve equated the merits of scuba to space travel. The fact that I’ll likely never be able to experience outer-space first-hand (though thanks to Google Earth in VR, I can now come faintly close) makes me feel that much more inclined to diving. I’m not allowed to check out the world up there, but there’s not much – present world situation excepted – barring me from world down there. There are a lot of ample diving fanatics, and we all get it. It’s like a secret universe, (at least seemingly) untouched by the 200 thousand years of human evolution. It’s nature pointing a big finger at us saying nothing down here gives a flying fuck what happens to you lot. But you’re welcome to check out how it will go on existing without you in all its glorious splendour.

Then there’s the more physical phenomenon – down there, the clunky technology you’re harnessed in allows you to become a fish. We have cheated nature by finding out how to become amphibians, and its allowed us to do so as risk-taking tourists. People die down there, or as a later consequence if not rescued by the iron lung, a term so foreboding that Radiohead named an album after it. Maybe the risk adds to the sense of wonder, or maybe the sense of wonder simply makes the risk worthwhile. And it’s not for everyone; even without presiding health conditions, there are a vast range of psychological fear factors – the most interesting to me being that of claustrophobia – preventing many from ever attempting it even under the safest conditions. But the sense of childlike wonder that compelled me to try scuba diving illegally as a pint-sized 11-year-old (the legal age is 12) and nearly drown from the weight of my tank, is no different than that which compels philosophers, scientists and artists. They call it a quest for truth, but call it what you will, it’s a quest for the sake of a quest, because quests are fun. Facebook now forever owns the trademark rights to that word.
That’s why this piece begins with a diver. Further inspection will reveal that the diving mask is actually a VR headset, and in the place of the tank and flippers, the extended hands hold a set of controllers. Maybe this came to me as a result of hanging out in the VR educational app Ocean Rift. Here you get to choose between a selection of scuba experiences, navigating by means of propelling the controllers through the water by squeezing the triggers in the direction you’d like to ‘swim’. But the point is – the wonder.

I’m interested in visual narratives that discard the laws of gravity that for whatever reason have a stranglehold on storytelling media. Instead of locking in to a page or pan left-to-right, I would rather be freed from the horizontal plain altogether. In my pet project, a constantly-moving comic about the polar divide in the US, the concept of the vertical reveal, as I’ve come to think of it, is the foundational structure of the story-telling. The timeline moves down. (Super Mario 2 – link)