The plane turns LA like an automated
display in a jeweller's window. This city
glitters: a glory of cars like hematite
facets set in a gold-chased silver plaque, chained
against sea-blue satin, mountain-green velvet;
or a microchip magnified a million
million times to turn it to automated
art, whose cars are flashes of data chased by
darkness, synapse-jumping while artificial
intelligence plays a winner-take-all round.
LA presents itself to ten
landed birds of passage (but not
of a feather) perched packed tight in
the shuttlebus from LAX:
a family in transit to
Chicago; and we strangers who
have come to confer – an Asian
who works in Aberdeen, for now;
a Dane who makes Lego live in
cyberspace; an American
pushing technology toward
gateways rather than barriers;
and me, a Michigander who's
nested in London for better
or worse, as far from there as here.
The farthest-ranging of us has
been studying a map, knows we're
nearly downtown, spots our towers
just as we suddenly detour
alarmingly to swing out east
FATAL ERROR TERMINATE NOW
courtesy of the driver (whose
sympathies lie not with us, but
with the Chicago-bound family
who have another kind of bus
to catch) we go the long way round
via the Greyhound terminal.
They make it on time. And we will,
eventually, after our
unexpected, unguided tour
of sites we conferees had not
meant to visit, or at least not
before checking in, chilling out,
coming down. Among wonders we
would have been poorer to have missed:
a large and venerable car
whose blow-torched paintwork is real gone
keeps up with the best of them down
mean streets a little east and south
of those generous thoroughfares
where we will spend our LA time.
INSUFFICIENT MEMORY TO
Two thousand six hundred of us:
elders, students, micro-softies,
johnny-appleseeders, blue-sky
software nerds, haptic cowboys, CHI
kids, digital librarians,
and sui generis Joy Mountford,
sui generis Tognazzini,
sui generis Jakob Nielsen,
sui generis Brenda Laurel,
sui generis Doug Engelbart,
sui generis Ben Shneidermann,
kindling, fuel and sources of heat
constitute a critical mass,
blow on glowing coals of thought. Sparks
fly, fire flies to conflagration.
Leap – from Memex to Genex, from
What's Cool (or Hot) to excellent
Web sites, from cyberspace display
of art to appropriating
public spaces, from surfing to
application, from mouse and screen
to bootstrap communities, from
toys-for-the-boys to games girls play –
over the transformational
flames of illuminated thought
processes, work processes, play
games with a possible future
we may choose to make. Which is why
we came here for some serious
fun on the way to tomorrow.
Weep them for drug deaths, murky deals,
family murders, extended
griefs, the falling-star suicides,
placebo art, spirit-less gifts,
the poisoned air, the beggared hopes.
But sparkle them as cooling rain
on pavements, windshields and sidewalks,
on up-turned faces in springtime
about to be summer; gather
them into arcs issued from mouths
of fish fountains pulsing alter-
nately then in unison from
pond to pond in the grand lobby
over the heads of guests who pass
between; cascade them over rocks
arranged in a raised groove along
steps winding down Bunker Hill to
wash up at that memory bank,
LA Central Library; pound
them in wave after wave against
Malibu, Santa Monica,
Venice, Hermosa, Redondo,
Zuma Beach and the rest, add their
salt-laden burden to debris
the tide leaves behind at farewell.
Leona Esther Medlin
(AKA Leona Carpenter)
for my CHI buddies at CHI 98, 18-23 April 1998
(conference of ACMÕs Special Interest Group
on Computer-Human
Interaction)
and every CHI since INTERCHI 93