I am not a specialist. Really, for everything I write about, there’s people that studied the very topic extensively. They know better than me. I am very aware of that.
I am a generalist and autodidact. I work in quite a lot of different fields and projects. Be it music, visual and performing arts, be it as a consultant or technician for museums, be it as a graphic designer or web developer. Technically I might be an amateur (happy to admit) but I am the one who is not using an App for a specific purpose but might develop one myself as the existing ones suck. I do not only use video projectors to project on a facade but will experiment with new ways of combining the projection with screens, materials and software to get an overall experience you ain’t seen nowhere yet. And of course I will write the projection and mapping software myself.
I will not use the kinect with the ready-made gesture recognition functions. I will use it’s depth sensor and write my own functionality with that – more reliable and much much quicker. And so on.
For 25 years I have played with modern media – whatever was modern at the time. In general I love the approach “let’s play with it, learn about it and then start thinking what we can do with it”.
I’m a big fan of modern technology.
Still…
As much as I love technology and the possibilities it brings – I am also sceptical about it. I see quite strange developments every day. Something new can be tempting, easy, practical even – without making our lives better. Worse: in may cases it is not even easy or practical – if you honestly think it through and especially if you take into account the future.
Often I ask customers the simple question “why?”, whenever they plan to install technology. You’d be surprised, how often they can’t answer.
It might seem difficult to evaluate and judge media and technology, but in the end it is some basic rules that apply to media as to everything else.
So there will be examples about bad use of media and technology here – eventually. This is not meant to discourage anyone using media but rather to give help in evaluating and judging technology and it’s use in projects of any kind. We do desperately need this skill…