commonplace log I: running wild
Existential fish, time dials and more updates
I was born and bred to run. When I came of age, I was taken in by an aristocrat and moved into her stable. There, I was taken care of.
Once a year, I was taken out to a show. She would walk me around in circles and guide me to hop over small obstacles. A small audience, would erupt into polite applause and congratulate her on her fine taste in horses. I was given a blue ribbon, a rub on the shoulder, and then returned to my stable.
All this time, I dreamed of racing. I waited for the day I’d be taken out to a winding track, not to chase after blue ribbons but to feel the thunder of hooves, dirt tossing in the air.
In my first job, I was a prized racehorse. Now, without a job, I stand on an open plain—no end in sight, no sight of safety. Yet, my hooves still dig into the ground, waiting for the moment a voice above me to say, “Go!”
It’s Friday, October 4th. Today marks day 4 of 90 of running after commonplace, the name I’m giving to this digital journal project. I spend tomorrow and day after camping, so this marks the “end of the week”, and the start of a series of weekly logs reflecting on the project’s progress.
In just two days of integrating interface experiments I did between July and September, the “space for contemplation” that I yearned for over a year ago, as documented in A Fish Is Just a Fish, is beginning to be take shape.
Screen Test of digital Fish (left) against their Real counterparts (right), recorded from that very bridge in Taiwan I went to. A shader to simulate ripples is coming next week.
There’s no database - it transacts with localstorage. Inter makes writing look like garish interface-speech. Fish swim existentially, in circles. The timeline scrubber is 1/3rd functional, in that it auto-rotates only to Days where I’ve written an Entry and not Weeks or Months. The “space” construction isn’t a spatial canvas unfolding to the right with stability and poise and grace, but its facsimile - a drag-and-drop grid that jitters as it expands to the right.
“Timeline Scrubber” in action: the Year, Month and Date Selectors are behave like dials that you can drag, scroll and flick. Once at rest after these interactions, each dial auto-rotates to the nearest position that contains an Entry.
However, even this earliest iteration had an effect on me. The combination of the large text, an orthographic camera projection over the fish and the soft, attention-guarding aesthetic created the illusion of a living and breathing space. The Fish, while un-endowed with behavior and speech, still felt embodied as beings, with bodies that could be seen undulating to currents from above.
Instigated by the Entry on the left, the System opens a “Scene” on the right comprising two “Cells”: a Physics Cell running a Matter.js simulation, and a Card Deck Cell presenting a stack of cards from the maybe its not so bad are.na channel.
This sense deepened with the addition of Scenes. While Cells were placeholder, they were physical: one Cell simulated three shapes from the Bauhaus’ Design and Form colliding elastically with one another, and the other simulated a deck of cards that you could pick up, read and put down, one at a time. None of this is useful, connected to the Entry, but the effect was, simply, conscious.
“Complexity isn’t the problem, ambiguity is. Simplicity isn’t the solution, clarity is.”
The first version of commonplace won’t be simple, but it will be clear.
It won’t have anything to do with knowledge discovery (yet), but it will have everything to do with creating a space for contemplation. Existing within this space will demand more effort, introduce more “friction” than scrolling, but in exchange it will give your Voice the space it needs to breathe, and there will be Fish to keep you company.
Your Voice will soon be able to toke any and all shapes - text, images, voice memos, videos, sketches, diagrams. But for the first version, you will just be able to write and bury media you’ve saved on are.na within it.
I separate the discovery from space is because I don’t have the conceptual insight yet about what knowledge should be discovered, because I don’t know why you would want to discover something in the first place:
1. Is it about self-knowledge, building an understanding of the Self? If so, how do we address questions of identity, meaning, and belonging in a "safe" or “right” way? I’m no philosopher, I don’t know what “safe” or “right” means. And this is an admission to what I know I don’t know - true discovery is about what I don’t know I don’t know.
2. Or is it discovery “more broadly”, with the self-constructing wikipedia experiments I did seeing the light of day?
3. Or is it about social spaces with less efficient protocols for interaction?
Perhaps all of these.
If you’d like to contribute to this - test an early version, float and spar ideas and direction, or even contribute design/code, get in touch with me at this email.