Issue 18: Art isn't a Gadget
Enter the Apple Vision Pro
Soft Labor is a “slow trend” report on design and visual culture — no rush to publish! — written by me, Sarah Hromack, a digital strategist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Related/Unrelated, an early aughts-style link roll of sorts, is a feature generally reserved for paid subscribers that I elected to publish beyond the paywall for this issue. Please consider supporting my work by subscribing.
Allow me to begin with a personal anecdote, one that I recall when I think about what it feels like to be genuinely delighted by technology — the real subject of today’s edition of Soft Labor. On a visit to San Diego well over a decade ago, I had the privilege of touring the Calit2 labs at UCSD with a group of colleagues — I believe we perused the Center for Graphics, Visualization, and, Virtual Reality (GRAVITY) and perhaps the Immersive Visualization Laboratory (IVL) — on a journey facilitated by eminent and prodigious digital cultural theorist Lev Manovich, who was teaching there at that time. It was a journey, one that I am so grateful to have had because, on that day, I experienced a series of Virtual and Augmented Reality-based projects with a sense of joy and pure wonder that I attribute in part to the generosity of the scientists I encountered, my own perception and visual training, as well as the fact that the mainstream press was barely talking about VR/AR at that time. (Sure, subject-specific publications like Wired had speculated about mixed reality for years, but there wasn’t yet a New York Times vertical and short-lived app-and-cardboard viewing device dedicated to the subject.)