Judith Donath, Founder, MIT Sociable Media Group

Exploring potential futures for life online and the joy of learning (and sharing) something new

Liam speaks with Judith Donath, the founder of MIT’s Sociable Media Group, inventor of e-cards, and author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Donath’s work offers crucial insights into the sociality of digital products and platforms, and the opportunities we have as digital producers to make things that truly meet sociable ends. In the episode, Donath unpacks some of this work, exploring potential futures for life online and the joy of learning (and sharing) something new.

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Liam Spradlin: All right, Judith, welcome to Design Notes.

Judith Donath: Hello. Happy to be here.

Liam: So, just by way of introduction, as usual, I want to ask you to tell me a little bit about your work and the journey that's led you there so far.

Judith: Wait. Where do you want me to start?

Liam: The beginning. (laughs)

Judith: Well, where I am right now is I am in the midst of writing a book about technology and deception. But the way I got here was a fairly roundabout way. My undergraduate degree was actually in history. And I was really interested in medieval history and early scientific revolutions. But in looking at how scientific revolutions change society, I got, I, you know, this is in the '80s. And I was thinking, you know, I could take computer classes. There's a whole technological revolution going on now. I could see what it's like on the inside. And I took one class and was completely hooked.

I loved programming. It was taught in APL, which was a language that used mostly just Greek characters to program, and everything is in the form of matrices. And it just seemed like this really fascinating way of thinking where you just are trying to model something, but you're turning everything into a series of matrices. And then, I learned Lisp, and it was turning everything into linked lists, and, you know, got really, really interested in programming. I had also been doing a lot of work in film.

And anyhow, this is how I eventually ended up working as a game designer, and then went to the Media Lab with its first opening. And was, uh, you know, because my background was considerably less technical than most people who are coming in from computer science, especially at that time, I had a background in history and film and art, um, my work, you know, from the very beginning, leaned towards looking at what sort of the humanistic side of computing was, really interested in what was going to happen when people could use computers to communicate, um, things like the, you know, early email, what it would be like to have a whole society connected. And that's the work I continued to do for quite a while.

Eventually, I stayed on at the lab, and I ran a research group called the Social Media Group, where we looked at the question of, you know, what, what is it, what does it mean to be in a social space online? And in particular, how do people get a sense of other's identity? What are the ways you pick up from these, like, very sparse queues? Now, those queues online are sparse, but one of the things you don't really think about is how sparse in many ways the queues are in everyday life.

The example I'd often use with my students was, what can we do to make an experience like sitting in an outdoor cafe, and just watching the world go by? People walk past, and you might be wrong, but you have a very strong impression of a lot of people of what their politics are, what their personality is, and it's based on like a fleeting glimpse of them. How does that work? And what would it mean to transform that in a world that we have so much more control over how it's designed? And so, we did a lot of work with visualization.

One of the things that I drew from my film background was, in film, you kind of break down, uh, you know, one of the ways of categorizing shots is long shots, medium shots and close-ups, where long shot gives you like this whole establishment of a big scene of the world, the whole setting, and environment. And medium shot is really about the relationship among a small group of people. It's, it's how you shoot a conversation. It's about reactions and how people are interacting with each other. And a close-up is really like a portrait where you're really looking at a specific individual.

And a lot of what we were interested in doing was thinking about how we could make online interfaces that both address those three different scales, but also would be able to kind of move smoothly between them. Needless to say, if you've looked at Facebook or Twitter, we're not quite there yet, um, in the actual world with real life living interfaces. But I think those sort of general problems are still a very useful way to think about it. And, in particular, now, with all the hype, I don't know there's excitement, but there's certainly a lot of hype, around the metaverse, um, that question of, of representation, and what is it you want to see of others, and how you structure that space should be at the forefront.

And one of the things that I think is very disappointing about the ways I've seen any of this imagined by the people who claim to be building it is that, they've kind of alighted that problem by basically saying, well, it's gonna kind of look like real life. Here's a picture. It's kind of cartoony, but we're all sitting in this kind of tedious looking meeting room. Like-

Liam: Right.

Judith: There's really no reason why you should wanna make that be your representation for an enormous number of reasons.

Liam: Right. I, I wanted to get into that a little bit, because as you're talking, it strikes me that, you know, you have a background in film, which is kind of representation of reality that's like attempting to capture some, something that it must exist in analog space, right?

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And then also working with virtual space, which, although it is created digitally, can represent almost anything. And I'm curious how you think about that, like the different ways of representing a type of reality that are available to us?

Judith: Well, one thing about film though is that, I think fairly early on, the practitioners were interested in getting away from that sort of pure reality, if, you know-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: It was one of the most avant-garde films or filmmakers was Andy Warhol, who just took a camera and turned it on for eight hours. That's a representation of reality. But it's both unwatchable, a very avant-garde, that it, it turned out that a lot of the way of creating a story with film was through doing things that have nothing to do with what we see in real life, all kinds of things about cutting, you know, how you cut films, how you make reaction. It doesn't necessarily have this analog to virtual space, but it was certainly very imaginative in trying to understand how you create something that is a time-based medium and has starts with a recording. But a lot of what makes film is the way it's cut, the, the pieces that are taken out of it.

Now, in terms of thinking about how we look at virtual spaces, you know, I think the, the problem is quite different, because ideally, we're not filming. But what we want to think about is, how do we represent in a visual sense the information about a person. So, I think, you know, a cartoon of someone is not gonna be that interesting, certainly be less interesting than looking at them face to face. But what is interesting is that you have all this history of interactions. And you have, how someone ha- like what someone has said, you have their words, you have, you might have who they follow. You have all these other pieces from which to build a representation from.

And I think that's the really interesting challenge. And it's not really been followed very much. There's, uh, a paper by, uh, Jim Hollan, and Will Stornetta, which is quite old at this point, but they had a line in it that's, uh, for me, has always resonated, which was saying that you, it's called, the paper's called Beyond Being There. And it's a challenge for designing social interfaces to say, we don't want to recreate reality. We want to do something that's beyond it. And it doesn't necessarily mean it has more detail or more pixels or more dimensions to it. Often, it's the removal of those things.

There's reasons why a lot of online forums that are text based are really interesting. It's not that they're missing a huge visual component. It's that you can do all kinds of things when in the interface, when you, you could thread things, you can move stuff around. So, it might be quite minimal, but it's not about representing the look of reality. It's about representing the relationships that you're developing in your virtual reality.

Liam: There is also something you said about film being a time-based medium that really stood out to me.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And now I'm thinking about how that applies to the other things that we're talking about, like a forum, for instance. I would suggest maybe less time based in the sense that people say things, and then you can refer back to what they said after a time where, in real life, you might have forgotten about it.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I wonder how that factors in to how you think about creating other virtual spaces.

Judith: Right. Well, yeah, one of the things we explored, it wasn't a dead end, but it was a place where there's lots of exploration still to do, is thinking about, for instance, those forums where stuff has been built up over time, how do you rep- you know, what's an, uh, much more interesting way of representing that sort of agglutinization of how things pile up over time. Or even something like I'm, you know, as I'm writing a book, I spent an enormous amount of time in Google Scholar, which is not something you normally think of as a social interface.

But if you think about the way that papers have citations in them, and those cite other things, and some, some papers become really popular, or they become really controversial, and there's, you know, if you could map that, which you can, you just happen to, but by mapping that, you would have a really interesting space to explore. You could see what's been influential. You could perhaps prevent people from doing the same thing over and over and over, because they're simply unaware of what they're building upon.

And even in forums, there are times you may want to do that, particularly in certain advice forums. I think it's a interesting design problem, both how do you extract the information about what is the interesting material, how do you map it, but also, how do you know when that's a useful thing to do, because sometimes with something like Wikipedia, you want to develop this encyclopedia of knowledge. But sometimes with a forum, the point is for each person to be able to go in and talk to other beginners or people at intermediate levels, or people want to teach. So, by making it all a reference site, you might lose that. So, it's, it's also about being thoughtful about whether where you're looking for the experience of the interaction versus the experience of being able to look up the information.

Liam: I'm really interested in this idea that the representation of you that exists in these spaces can be something like an assemblage of information, and maybe also visuals, but, but-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... also primarily information. I want to dig more into that, like the concept of being embodied, virtually, and how many shapes that can take.

Judith: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you know, uh, again, I think this is a, uh, still a research problem and something that for a variety of reasons is not part of our current interfaces. But let's use Twitter as an example, because it's pretty simple. And it, but it's also one of the places I feel need something like this the most, because you're quite likely to encounter people who you have no idea who they are, or if they are a person, or are they, you know, are they a bot? Are they someone who's just come in as a provocateur?

So, if you could see people very easily as a representation that, you know, would still be like a avatar, something you could see at a glance. But instead of being a drawing, it was a visualization that showed you something about their history online. Is this someone who's been posting for years? Or did this account appear a week ago? What are the words and phrases that show up a lot in their history? How has that changed over time? How many followers do they have? And can we have a little representation of what sort of things do those people talk about? And who is it that they follow? Yeah, when a service like you could be like a set of word clouds type of thing, but something like that that would give you, at a glance, a way of starting to get a vivid impression of who they are in a way that's relevant for that space.

Liam: One thing that stands out to me is a connection to a piece of discourse that I think I encounter often about social media, which is that it is perhaps presenting us with too much information or information that is like too disparate, and yet drawn together, that it becomes overwhelming for us to handle.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I wonder how such an embodiment would interact with that, if it is even a valid idea. And the second thing is how we would come to understand our own embodiment in that context, whether or not we could actually modify or manipulated after the fact.

Judith: Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, in terms of sort of quantities of information, again, that's a design issue. So, you could think of it this way. All of these things can exist at, at multiple scales, where there would be something that you would just see at a glance, and it would be sort of like the avatar that sits by this, this side, but instead would at least give you that basic information, like how long has this person been online, you know, a quick visual presentation of, you know, how much do they post, how long would've they been posting, how many followers do they have, how many people do they follow. So, that could be just a very straightforward, simple, almost stick figure scale piece. But then you could have, you know, like a simple slider-like thing that just starts to drill, you know, if you s- are curious, you could just see a more and more detailed version of it as you, you know, if you're like, oh, I want to see more of this.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: You don't have to have like a huge pile of information. But that's, you know, that's not a complicated design question. The question of what your editing abilities are of that past, that's really, I would say, application specific, and that's part of what makes the different environments that we go to, because there are some, there may be some spaces that are about saying, conversations here are ephemeral, you know. You say some things, they're here for a day, and then they're gone. Other spaces may be about saying, you say this is like the congressional record. It is never gonna go away and it's gonna be here for life, and you can't change it.

And there's others that's, you know, they could say, well, you have this. You can delete things. Maybe you can't add things. Those are all like, you know, in a way of thinking about it is that this platform is a little bit like going to different restaurants, you know. It's not that a fancy French restaurant is better than McDonald's. It is in certain things, but not if you're taking six, six-year-olds out to dinner, you know.

Liam: Right.

Judith: That you really want something with plastic surfaces that you can clean really easily. So, you know, all those questions about history really change the tenor of the social experience. But I think in a more ideal world, we'd have more platforms and more spaces, and an easier ability to choose among those. You know, it would be the sort of thing people could choose, you know, even at the level of their own page or their own, you know, if I post this, I'm gonna start a discussion. Now, I'm the host of the discussion.

And I can change the parameters for it in a way that's clear to the people participating in a richer way. I think things like that would, as people became used to it, would I think help us be able to create the types of conversations we want over different ideas, the same as we now know you can invite someone for coffee is very different than saying, I need to speak to you in my office right now.

Liam: Right. (laughs) Or sending, sending a text that says we need to talk.

Judith: Yeah.

Liam: I'm wondering. Being able to do all of this in a digital or virtual environment makes it perhaps a lot faster or easier compared to actual life where, you know, if you invite someone to coffee, you need to actually probably physically go to the coffee place and agree on where that is, and how to get there-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... and everything. Whereas, maybe you could do more of those things faster on a larger scale, digitally.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I'm curious what that means for how this form of interaction contributes to our personhood or our understanding of ourselves.

Judith: Yeah. I think, well, for one, this is a huge revolution we have lived through in our time. You know, it's actually very quickly that we've kind of forgotten how revolutionary it is. I mean, there's a paper called something like Mass Conversation, and it's from the '80s or early '90s. And, but it's like basically saying, like, hey, you know, we're having conversations with 50 or 100 people. This is just unprecedented. And it became a pretty much something we, we got used to that you would go online and, and just be in some conversation with enormous number of people.

But, so, there's a couple of, there's a number of interesting ramifications about that. One is that these conversations are also very lightweight. There's very little commitment, in particular, the fact that you are not physically present and that in many situations, your identity is either easily obscured or effectively irrelevant. If people don't know who you are, they may get to know your real name. But in general, that may not make a huge difference. So, the lightweightness tends to make it so that people feel that there's very little consequence, and there's cer- certainly a lot less meaning to it.

The, you know what you said about the effort that goes into even just having a coffee, but that effort gives it us, the experience a certain significance that we lose here. We have this bigger scale, so we have a much larger scale of less significant interactions. So, that's one big change. And then, there's the whole question of how are people drawn together. It also means that we've lost the significance of geography in a lot of ways. The fact of, you know, we ha- we're able to do this easily. You're on the West Coast. I'm on the East Coast.

People can talk all over the world. But it may mean that we lose track of what cultural differences may underlie a lot of the conversation which, when you're speaking face to face, whether it's that you, uh, have an easier time noticing that there's all kinds of cultural behaviors that remind you that you may only share a certain number of assumptions with the people around you, all get kind of flattened online. So, what we're dealing with is a world where everything is a little bit cheaper, but there's much more of it. And-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: You know, I think that goes hand in hand with a lot of other social changes, some of which are separate from the internet. There's at a much larger scale where we are less dependent on other people. If you look at, if you read stories of like, life in 1800, where you might need your neighbors to help you with the harvest, or help you repair your house or raise your house, you need pretty significant committed relationships to live in a world like that. The internet has come, you know, probably not coincidentally, at a time when we were already moving a lot of the things we need other people for to a market.

Like I don't have to rely on family to have babysitters. I can hire someone. You know, I can hire a stranger. There's a, you know, I'm not asking someone to help me harvest my food. In fact, I'm just buying it at the supermarket. So, we have this opportunity to have all these relationships and conversations in this very lightweight way at a time when we are already kind of in the fading days of certain types of very expensive, in terms of time and effort and reliance on relationships.

Liam: What do you think are the most pressing design challenges in the space right now?

Judith: There's some huge pressing issues in the world that are somewhat conversation based. And a lot of that is around misinformation and, um, our inability to deal with diversity, and the, you know, sort of the growing hostility between political camps both in the United States and worldwide. So, those are, are worldwide issues. They're very conversation based. They certainly have representation online. So, I would say in, you know, in terms of pressing this, the question of how to get people to be able to converse and interact in a meaningful and useful way with people they do not agree with is probably the most pressing one. You know, it may not be the most exciting design challenge, but it's probably the most pressing issue we're dealing with.

Liam: I think that also speaks to the way in which the intent of designers, and software engineers too, for that matter, plays out in these conversational spaces or digital products. I'm thinking a lot about, you know, is the answer that as a discipline, we simply have to own up to that and come up with solutions to this problem? Or do we actually need to divest some of the power that we have taken in that in order for that to improve?

Judith: I think the, probably the most pressing problem, on the flip side, is that an enormous number of design decisions are made, not with the goal of how to make the best social space or how to solve these things, but they're made in terms of how do we satisfy advertisers. How do we get people, you know, how do we get people to stay online more? How do we get them to do these things? But they're, these are not social goals. And so, our interfaces are not being designed to make the social experience better. They're designed to make the extractive experience better.

Liam: Right.

Judith: And, and so, I think finding ways to have significant and heavily used sites that are designed for the social purposes. I mean, there's some, I think, pretty well known analyses that say, you know, certain things about how some conversational interfaces are made now or that effectively end up encouraging disputes, because to a simplistic assessment algorithm, it looks like engagement, you know.

Liam: Right.

Judith: You know, it might mean if you want to follow that path, your computational analyses of conversation needs to be more sophisticated, and not mistake argument for engagement. It may be that engagement isn't the right goal. It might be that trying to algorithmically prolong or shorten conversations isn't a really useful thing. Maybe let the actual people who are participating make that decision and don't really try and weigh on it in either direction.

Liam: Right.

Judith: When you spoke earlier about sort of this accumulation of information that we have in these discussions.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: So, the earliest discussion space, both I was familiar with, and, and then I did a lot of work analyzing was Usenet, which was just threaded topical discussions with sort of no algorithm, but very heavily text based. And it had a pretty rich culture, you know, and information would grow. And then, at some point, people would say, okay, well, we're tired of explaining, you know, how to, let's say it was a group on having like a home aquaria. You know, these are some basic things. We'll put it in a FAQ, and then we'll continue to have that discussion. And they would tell people, read that information, then join in the discussion.

But there was still a interesting, ongoing discussion, and there wasn't any index into it. There are multiple things that went into the demise of Usenet. But I think one of them was, at some point, Google bought up all the, or gathered up the archives of it and indexed it. And what happened then was that, instead of, when I wanted to learn something about a particular field, instead of what people had done, which was get to that news group and start reading it, become familiar with the people in the conversation, and then dive in, you could just make a query, and you would get an answer. And if that didn't answer it, then you just make another question.

But because you could dive into a whole index of the discussion, people stopped seeing it as a social space where they got to know the people and the participants, and then took part in it. They just sort of saw it as a encyclopedia you could query. And it changed the nature of it enough that that was, you know, well, it wasn't the only reason it stopped being a useful space. That was one of them. But that was certainly done with very, with good intention of making it more usable. But it had this fairly unexpected opposite effect.

Liam: Right. Yeah. It feels like it's coming from a place that I think many things in the tech industry come from, which is that data are the ultimate resource for understanding things.

Judith: Well, that and then what's a big theme in the book that I'm working on is that, a lot of technology is really designed to make things more efficient. But it turns out, a lot of things that are costly to do, those costs, and I mean in cost and energy, or time or effort, allow those costs to now to actually be really valuable in some way. You know, in that example, it was the cost of sort of reading through all these conversations. There are other costs that have to do with, you know, the commitment, the effort to make go for the coffee or the dinner.

And when you build technologies that make things more efficient, it's great when the effort that you've now eliminated really was kind of wasted effort. But it turns out like an awful lot of examples of the effort really weren't useless, uh, and particularly often serve some important social purpose, either in showing your commitment to someone or something, or making you more adept at something before you go on and try something else. And when you build tools that eliminate that, you've taken away something really valuable.

Liam: Right. You know, speaking of Usenet, I also want to talk about another case that is very dear to me from earlier in the internet's history that I think could be a really interesting conversation as we talk about, you know, the design challenges of relatively new modes of, of existing online. And that's e-cards.

Judith: Okay. (laughs)

Liam: I feel like the progression of e-cards could be a nice surface to map these ideas onto, especially as I think about, you know, my own history with the subject as starting in a time when email was really exciting.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I think in many ways, the internet, you know, still had a capacity for emulating some of these offline mental models. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, because you're cited as the inventor of e-cards.

Judith: I am the inventor of e-cards. Well, I was procrastinating writing my thesis. (laughs) Yeah, that's, so, I'll tell you how I ended up doing it. And then I can talk a little bit about my thoughts on this.

Liam: Sure.

Judith: Uh, well, and I was working on my thesis, and so open to any kind of distraction that anyone wanted to present to me. And my office mate was, had gotten very, very excited about the computer language, Perl, and actually, you know, was writing the, one of the early textbooks on Perl and insisted I learn it. Uh, it's a language I still cannot stand. But I had done some consulting for a company. Uh, I, you know, some early internet company was trying to do some online travel thing. And I had suggested to them like, hey, if you're gonna do like travel, why don't you like have, like, postcards people could send from somewhere online? And they looked at me like I had six heads. It's like, yeah, no. Not interested in that idea at all.

So, and my office mate, this idea was floating around in my head when he said, you've got to learn Perl. I thought, well, I need to assign myself a problem. And that's how I will learn it. And I thought, well, why don't I try and do online postcards? How would that work? How would you send a postcard to someone? So, that was the genesis of it. It was not a deep research piece or anything. And so, I had lived, before I went to graduate school, I had lived in the East Village in the '80s, when it was still mostly burned out buildings and everything. And it was, (laughs) the postal workers there were very surly, a couple of times had found all our building's mail in the trash. (laughing)

And, um, so, I've modeled the postcard site, uh, off that sort of model of disgruntled postal worker. So, it's very cranky. And you would, basically, for those who haven't seen this, you would get an email. That's, you know, someone sent you a postcard. You get a email that said, you have a postcard waiting for you. Because one of the issues was the wa- uh, it's, also this is, another piece of this is that the web was very new. And there weren't that, there were almost no, pretty much no social applications on it. And so, for me, like coming from things like Usenet, the web was kind of cool. But it was also a little disappointing, because, you know, especially then it was just pages. There just wasn't a way to interact with others.

And so, trying to figure out how to put some form of interaction into it was part of the postcard challenge. And so, it had to be this kind of kludgy thing where you would get an email that told you to go to a page, and the page would then be rendered with a postcard for you. And I started it, you know, I think it was, I'm thinking 1994. And it came out right before Valentine's Day. And so, like there were a couple days, so, two postcards, sent three, seven, 10. And then, Valentine's Day hit, and that was in the hundreds, then it was in the thousands. And within a couple of months, it had taken down the network to the Media Lab, and I had to have, like, a special line run to my computer so that it wasn't taking down the entire net there, because it was so incredibly popular for about a year.

And so, one of the challenges, my adviser was like, wow, this is really amazing. You've done this really successful thing. You know, you know, this has to be a thesis. I'm like there just isn't a big there, there. It's online postcards. And so, I spent a fair amount of time. Usually, you have to write about this. Like, I'm like, well, what can I say about this? So, the sort of deepest insight I was ever able to extract from this project was that, when you write, you have this technology. People just, you know, this is still when, as you said, email was exciting. But one of the things is, when you write a email, you have to say something. And you often don't really have anything to say. And that's-

Liam: Yeah.

Judith: ... I think what people really liked about the postcards, because it became this way to just, it's a li- a little bit like a little present that you could send to someone. You know, there were all kinds of, I mean, part of it was I spent a lot of time gathering like a huge range of postcards, which I'll talk about in a second. But it was a way to reach out to someone and send them a note without actually having any reason or meaning. Like email is, is really something you, you know, you have to have some message. You can't just say hi and that's it. But you could send a postcard and just say hi.

And I think that's what people really wanted. And in, then, you know, if you think more deeply about it, if you look at things like social psychology, there's the concept of phatic, P-H-A-T-I-C, interaction, where it's the interactions we have, where there's not a lot of content in it. But they're really important for just sort of aligning people. If you look at, you know, if you run into like, uh, an acquaintance in the grocery store, the conversation may be completely empty. And people say, well, small talk, it's so useless.

But it's not. It, you know, how you use it, the fact that you, you know, even eng- you know, even engage in conversation with someone, says, okay, I acknowledge you, you know, if you remember a little bit about them, there's all kinds of social information in that. And what the postcards did was that let you have that type of interaction that email didn't. And I think that was its big social contribution.

Liam: Yeah. You know, I can't help but notice that it kind of created one of these types of, I guess, low resource interactions that we were talking-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... about before that have become so prolific, and also that it was something that came from a social desire to meet social ends, and was hugely influential because of that.

Judith: Mm-hmm. And it also, some part of it was to let you just sort of reach out and touch someone in subtle way. And it was also that it let people say, I have found something new.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: And then send it to others, which people really liked to do now. Now, that's been so speeded up that it's, you know, a whole different expectation of what is new. But still, you know, I think at that time, there would be a few new things on the net. But this is, you know, this is even before, I think it's bef- you know, it's either the very early days of Google or before Google Search, where simply the problem of finding something new online was significant. How did you find things?

Liam: Yeah. And I also think it's like a very human impulse to want to demonstrate that you have some new knowledge.

Judith: Great. Something new, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Liam: Just in itself.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: I think that's a great thing to wrap us up with, Judith.

Judith: Okay.

Liam: Thank you so much-

Judith: Thank you.

Liam: ... for joining me.

Judith: This was really fun. You have great questions, and this has been really enjoyable.

Tom Boellstorff, Anthropologist, Coming of Age in Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on life—and the future—in virtual space.

In this episode, Liam speaks to Tom Boellstorff, Anthropologist and UCI Professor, whose ethnographic work in Second Life (documented in his book, Coming of Age in Second Life) provides important insights into how virtual space – and our interface with it – informs and interacts with our lives in actual space.

In virtual worlds like Second Life, inhabitants exist only through their own acts of creation, which also serve as a primary mode of experiencing life in virtual space.

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Liam Spradlin: Hi, Tom. Welcome to Design Notes.

Tom Boellstorff: Thank you for having me.

Liam: So to start out with, as is tradition on Design Notes, tell me a little bit about your work and specifically the journey that led you there.

Tom: Sure. I'm an anthropologist and I'm a professor at the University of California, Irvine. And I actually started out doing research in Indonesia many years ago about gay and lesbian Indonesians and sort of how identities move around the world on how they change and don't change when that happens. And I started doing that research in 1992. I started doing it a long time ago before the internet was even there. But when I was doing that research, I really saw the influence of mass media already, television and films and things like that. And that got me interested in technology and media.

And after doing that research for about, oh, 15 years in Indonesia, I thought, "Oh, I'll try something a little different." And so I had had that interest in technology and so got interested in virtual worlds. And this was in the early 2000s when they were just getting started and thought, "What would happen if I tried studying virtual worlds using the same approach that an anthropologist uses when they go to Indonesia or anywhere else, trying to understand a culture? How is it different or similar? How does it work?"

And so I sort of tried that out as an experiment and it worked really well and there you have it. And so for a while now I've been doing digital anthropology research about the internet. So I've been very lucky to have a career where I get to do all kinds of different stuff and I'm getting ready now to sort of come back to virtual worlds and do a research project on the anthropology of the metaverse, people are calling it nowadays, and looking at some things that are going on around that.

Liam: It's striking to me when you characterize your work before virtual worlds as exploring kind of the nature of identities and how those shift and change in different regions of the world, that studying a virtual world must kind of explode that concept.

Tom: It is interesting. Like in some ways it explodes it. But one thing that has always surprised me studying virtual worlds is that a lot of it isn't that different. And so seeing a film or a movie or getting an idea of a concept from somewhere else in the world and transforming it. Like in the case of Indonesia, which is the fourth biggest country in the world, that's been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. Indonesians are almost 90% Muslim and many of the others are Christian or Buddhist. Those all came from elsewhere. The idea of the nation state came from elsewhere, being a nation and so many ideas. And that happened in the US as well.

And so humans have always been very trans-local, like ideas and things have always flowed and moved. And sometimes that's because of people moving. But sometimes ideas can move when people don't. And that is something that with the virtual world kind of thing really gets transformed in really interesting ways. And one thing that is sort of exploded, or one thing that is truly different is the difference between an idea moving from one place to another physically, whether that be aided by radio or movies or internet, compared to an idea taking form in the internet itself. And that is something different because a movie or a book is really interesting, but we can't talk there together. But right now we're talking. And so there is something really cool that happens with the possibility for those kinds of virtual spaces, for sure, that's something that's really interesting to study.

Liam: I wanted to get into that more, but first I want to back up and just define a couple of terms as we get into this conversation. So first, how would you characterize a virtual world or virtuality in general?

Tom: Yeah, that's a really good point. So right now, especially in this sort of new era of metaverse hype that we're in, virtual gets used in two different ways that are actually very different. And so it's important to keep those separate but also look at areas where they overlap. So one is VR, virtual reality, which means the goggle kind of Oculus Rift thing where you see things in 3D and that's really cool, and whatever, the technology's improving.

But you can do VR without the internet at all. You could have a flight simulator on your computer, on your laptop, if it's not even plugged into the internet. So virtual reality is about an interface. It doesn't have anything to do with being online at all. You can do it, unplug your computer from the internet, turn off the Wi-Fi, and you could do VR with any kind of game that you're playing or a flight simulator or something. And so that's what virtual reality means.

Virtual worlds means a shared online place where this is a picture of my house in Second Life, one of my houses in Second Life, where if I shut off my computer and I come back the next day, it's still there because it's on the cloud. It's a shared place online. That's what a virtual world is. And that's different from a social network site. And we even see that in English where we say that you go on Facebook but you go in Minecraft or Fortnite or something like that, Second Life.

Many of the early virtual worlds were text-based. You don't even need VR. You don't even need graphics. They can just be text, where it would say, "Tom walks into a room. The room has three chairs and a table." And for instance, when some disabled folks with visual impairments use Second Life, they use readers that read it out as text. So even nowadays. So you can have VW, you can have a virtual world without VR and you can have VR without VW. One's about interface and one is about shared place. And so it's confusing because those are two pretty different meanings of the word virtual.

Now, part of the whole metaverse thing is the kind of Venn diagram where you can have a virtual world that uses VR. Super cool as long as you don't get nauseous or whatever. And so you can combine them, but you don't have to. And it's actually pretty clear that most people don't. And I don't think the future of the metaverse is that they're always going to come together, which is sort of a matrix idea. Because that's why so many companies are doing all of the AR, augmented thing where you can still see through if you wear the glasses. Because it's clear that having that kind of 360 immersion in a virtual world can be super cool, but probably not all day long, at least for most folks.

Liam: Out of curiosity, what do you think the implications would be of widely adopted augmented reality in the actual world?

Tom: It's so hard to say because so often with these kinds of things, companies will come up with use scenarios and then what people actually do with it is so different. And if you look at the history of technology, which I'm very interested in, you see that. When the iPhone first came out, people thought you'd hold it up and talk on it and everyone was worried about brain cancer and people didn't really even think about apps or that it'd be connected to a watch or whatever. And so often uses are emergent from new technologies. And so there's a whole bunch of predictions out there, but if history is any guide, they're mostly going to be wrong. And the really cool stuff we're going to really want to sort of be watching to see what it is that folks do with these things. The big warning around all of this stuff is that you could have this stuff being largely developed by governments or nonprofit organizations, but that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where the Metaverse kinds of technologies are overwhelmingly being developed and implemented by for profit corporations. And so what is being talked about in terms of what is going to be used for is very much driven by a certain kind of commodity product mentality of those companies. Which is probably just scratching the surface of what could actually happen. And so right now that kind of prediction stuff is very much being driven by marketing and it's very much being driven by for profit corporations that probably aren't going there in all kinds of directions of cool stuff that could be done with these technologies.

Liam: I think that many of the things that we're seeing predicted, there was a video circulating recently, at the time we're recording, of someone shopping for I think a bottle of wine in a store in, again, NVR. But I think that many of the things that people are thinking of in terms of the notion of having property, the notion of buying things, the notion of creating things have already played out in Second Life in a certain way.

So I want to talk about a concept that you established in your book, Coming of Age in Second Life called creationist capitalism. Because I think this idea that the world that we're talking about is actually a space in which you can do things and in which you can create things although it is a creation itself is really interesting and something that should be talked about as we revisit the idea of existing in this space.

Tom: Yeah. So a couple great points you mentioned. One is that one really negative effect of the corporate hype around the Metaverse, but around this stuff more generally is a lack of attention to history, which is very common in that hype. And it's amazing, Second Life is almost 15 years old now, and it's amazing how many people will be surprised or say, how can you still be doing stuff in Second Life, it's old.

And no one ever asked me that about Indonesia. No one ever says, why do you still go to Indonesia, why are you still interested in Indonesia, Indonesia's really old. You should only be studying new things. And that idea that we're only interested in what is new or big is definitely coming out of that pipe of the industry that can damage our research agendas in that way.

And this idea that people will often ask about, is this going to take over and have a billion users or should we just pack up and go home without any idea of a middle ground is also I think damaging. Because there's so many interesting things going on let's say with virtual worlds that have between a half million and five million active users. That's a lot of people. But part of the hype cycle is, if you're not going to hit a billion then I don't care.

And so I think thinking about looking at the whole range of things that people are doing online, not only the top two, is very, very important because often a lot of pioneering and interesting stuff is happening in smaller spaces that aren't getting noticed by the tech framing of these things.

And that idea of creationist capitalism is also really interesting and important because, especially right now, this moment that we're in around the Metaverse, not everything is new. A lot of what's going on is not new, but some of it is new. But it's really hard to tell right in the moment what is actually new and what's not, it's surprisingly difficult. That's always the case.

After five years, it's easy to look back and say, oh, this part of it was innovative and new and this part was not. But right when it's coming out, it's remarkably difficult sometimes to figure out what's new and what's not.

So the creationist capitalism thing is just thinking about, in the most basic sense of thinking about economics, going back to Marx or going back to basic economics, commodity production requires materials and labor, so if I'm going to build a house or a chair or a car or something, I need human labor to make that. And then there's the materials, I need cloth to build a shirt or a coat, I need metal and plastic to build a car, I need wood or whatever to build a chair. And the commodity models of economics are based around these factors of materials and labor and other things as well. But those are the big things, time and other things show up as well. But materials and labor are the big stuff.

And with creationist capitalism, what I was trying to think about is that with online commodity production, you really lose in many ways that material side of it. And so creativity itself becomes a new kind of labor in a virtual world, whether that's Fortnite or Decentraland, you get cool gear in Fortnite or you build something in Minecraft or you build a chair in Second Life. To make a thousand copies of that chair or one copy of that chair is almost no difference, just a teeny amount of bandwidth and server space. But you don't need a thousand times the materials like you do if you're making a thousand chairs.

So creationist capitalism is a way of thinking about what happens to capitalism when that materiality shifts. There's still the materiality of the computer and the keyboard, but there's not the materiality of what's needed to actually make the commodity in the same way.

And so we are moving into a world where, there's still going to be physical objects sold, lots of them, but there's a lot of stuff nowadays being sold that is virtual. And the NFT, the non fungible token thing, is part of that. Part of what an NFT is doing is actually trying to break this model of creationist capitalism. It's worth more because of scarcity, there's only a few of them.

And for 15 years, in Second Life you can do that. So if you make an object, a chair in Second Life, you can have it be free to copy or you can say this is unique, it can't be copied further. And you are basically turning it into an NFT then. And that interrupts that scarcity model where the same cost to make a hundred or to make one. So NFTs are basically trying to recreate the scarcity of physical objects where you need more wood or more metal to increase the value. It's that same idea.

So yeah, I mean, there's more to creationist capitalism than that obviously. But to me, one interesting piece of it is this issue of digital objects for which the materiality cost of their production is zero or close to zero compared to the physical objects.

Liam: I'm curious because it strikes me, and I think this comes through in Coming of Age in Second Life as well, that this mode of material-less creation or creation that is not as intensive on materials has huge implications for your experience of the virtual world, but also can reflect back into your experience of the actual world. Specifically in how you design your own embodiment and environment in a virtual world. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that. And also from a philosophical perspective, if the manufacturing of scarcity has an impact on that and what that impact is?

Tom: Yeah, I mean, that's a deep question, so I don't really have a complete answer for that. But it is true that because of the lack of scarcity in that sense, often people in a virtual world, their homes are palaces or they're really big, or they can have 10 cars, they can have a virtual Ferrari. And there has been interesting thinking about how is it that you can have a shift in social class in that sense.

But then also the other side of that, once again, I'm not the first person to say this kind of thing, is could this then, if it's not done right, lead to a world where rich people have a big house and a yacht in the physical world and less rich people have a pod or a small studio apartment and they have a yacht and a mansion online. And is that a way to shut them up because they don't get to have equality in the physical world.

So you can imagine this as being a way to exacerbate or increase class inequality. Or not. It's not really inherent in the technology, as with so many of these things it's what we do with it. And so it is interesting how we think about scarcity and abundance, and the way in which NFTs are trying to reintroduce scarcity into a virtual environment that, historically, one of the selling points is you don't need it. You don't need to have scarcity. But because our economic models are predicated on scarcity, then how are things going to get expensive if everyone can have it, right? And one point of view would be, who cares? Let's let everyone have stuff. Another can be, if I'm thinking in that capitalist model, or I need to make money, and the only way I can think about that is through scarcity, then I have to try and artificially create scarcity in a virtual space, because that's the only way I can think about money making.

So it's a really interesting question, once again, about how our economic models are intersecting with these new technologies, especially, once again, given a context where it's not, when you think about VR or virtual worlds, these metaverse spaces, it's not like you have five big corporations going up against like five nonprofits, a nonprofit consortia all doing it and seeing what happens. It's all corporate, and so we really have to push back and be creative to think about these other kinds of things, because the nonprofit space online, the kind of Wikipedia, Internet Archive, other kinds of things that are out there, nonprofit stuff, it's out there, absolutely. But it is very much overwhelmed in the public discourse by the corporate stuff. It is much, much bigger.

Sometimes, when people say, "Oh, the technology causes X, or the technology is doing X," we need to step back and say, "The technology when viewed through this capitalist model does X, but we can think otherwise. That's not the only way this technology could be used." And that's going to be a real challenge moving forward, unless there's some big movement to sort of think of these things more on the line of utilities, where we really want to support non-corporate models for them.

Liam: In a previous episode of the show, I talked to Kerry Murphy, who runs a studio called The Fabricant, and The Fabricant produces virtual couture, so fashion that only exists in virtual space, and you can apply it either to a photo of yourself or to an avatar. In Kerry's case, he had a photorealistic avatar created, and in the episode, we talked about how he tried out programming this avatar to do certain dance moves or wear clothes that he would never wear.

So I'm really interested in this idea that I think you also get into in the book about how this mode of creation in virtual space allows you to embody yourself in ways that are perhaps wildly divergent from the embodiment that you have in the actual world, and what that means to people and the implications that it has when you can kind of design yourself?

Tom’s Ethnographia in Second Life

Tom: Yeah, no, it's a super interesting question, and it's something that is really affected by the particular kind of virtual world in question. So some virtual worlds, and a lot of the biggest virtuals out there are designed as games, right, like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or something like that, and often, in those virtual worlds, there are fairly strict limits placed on your avatar embodiment. If you are in a Star Trek virtual world, you can't be a hobbit and you can't be Darth Vader because it's supposed to be Star Trek, not Star Wars, right? And so there are limits, and often in those spaces, avatar customization is often more about clothing or weapons, gear, stuff like that.

And then there are virtual worlds that allow you to look almost any way that you want, and so in a virtual world like Second Life, you can be photorealistic. You can also be a refrigerator or an animal or a ball of light or a different gender or between genders or a dragon. So some of them are very open ended and some of them aren't, so that has an effect. And another thing that has an effect is whether you're allowed to have one avatar or more than one avatar. So in Second Life, you have one avatar, but you can have as many free Second Life accounts as you want. It's just like getting Gmail accounts or something like that.

And so most people in Second Life have multiple avatars, and they'll call them alts, and sometimes a common thing that will happen is someone might have an alt that is closer to their physical world embodiment, and then another one that's more different for sort of fantasy purposes or for fun, they want to be another gender, that kind of thing. So if you only get one versus if you can have multiple, that's also going to change what people do with them.

And so you see all kinds of amazing creativity around that kind of embodiment, whether that be people who think they might be trans trying to be the other gender, and maybe that helping them understand themselves. There are support groups that happen for that kind of thing. People who identify with animals and love animals being animals, people who want to be younger or older than their physical world embodiment. I've worked with people in Second Life who are in their eighties, and they sometimes embody as a avatar who's 20 years old. In several cases, I've talked to people about that, where they say, "I'm not trying to hide who I am, but I don't want people to know that about me at first," because they love going to a dance or going to a club and having people talk to them and dance with them and whatever, and then if they ask, "Oh, who are you? How old are you?" they'll say, "I'm 82."

But they'll say, "In my physical world, that same person just would walk past me on the street and not even talk to me or look at me. But if they meet me and they talk to me, this 20-year-old body is actually, in some ways, it's who I am. I used to be this old, and I think this is some way the authentic me." And people just, I had one person say, "It's like you take a zipper and pulled me out, and that's who I am. And I love it, because I'm not immediately dismissed for being 80 years old. People get to know me, and then I tell them." And so there's also that interesting kind of thing that can happen socially, where people can be so quick to judge people based on their race, based on their gender, based on disability, based on age, and to not be immediately judged on that, people... One person in Second Life once told me, and this is in my book, where in Second Life, you get to know people from the inside out, instead of the outside in.

So that kind of thing is really wonderful. And then in some virtual worlds, yes, you can not only have clothing, but you can make and sell clothing, and in many virtual worlds, that can be a real source of income. And one thing that's from, it's not in my Second Life book, in some of my more recent writings on disability, one person I worked with was a fashion designer in the physical world who had to stop because of a disability, because of Parkinson's disease, and sort of just stumbled into Second Life just to check it out, and realized that she could actually do fashion in Second Life. So this is another example where we can't often predict what the use will be.

And she started making money in Second Life, some pretty good money in Second Life, and is now a very well-known fashion designer. But for her, it was also this huge emotional thing of being able to reconnect to a career that she thought she would have to get rid of forever because she could no longer hold a needle or do that kind of stuff, and she was able to bring back a creative side of her life that really meant a lot to her. And on top of that, one thing she really found interesting, having been a professional fashion designer, is that in Second Life, gravity works differently. Avatar bodies work differently, fabric drapes differently, and that was a cool challenge, and is a cool challenge for her. And I know people who are architects who had to quit their jobs, and love building homes in Second Life as well.

But yeah, so the avatar embodiment kind of thing is really interesting. And unfortunately, we still see racism and sexism and ageism happen in these spaces based on avatar looks, but it doesn't have to be that way, and there's also a lot of people pushing back against that and trying to think about new kinds of inclusive communities that we can build through avatar embodiments in these spaces. And so it's going to be a really interesting area moving forward, because in theory, you could have a virtual world that didn't have avatars, that people just sort of looked around and were ghosts, but it basically never happens. And so it is a really interesting area to watch as we move forward, and once again, how do people do different stuff with them based on the degree to which there's flexibility or multiplicity?

Liam: Right. And I think that that whole discussion highlights another point from your book that I thought was so important, which is that when we think about corporations coming into a space like Second Life and their motivations. What they would actually find out is that this mode of creation is the consumption that people are interested in, that creation is the mode of existence in that space, right?

Tom: Yeah. Well, and that idea of user generated content has become huge because YouTube doesn't make the videos, Facebook doesn't make the posts, Twitter doesn't make the tweets, and so a lot of these companies are based on a user generated content model. And in virtual worlds, open ended ones like Minecraft or Decentral and Second Life, that kind of thing are doing that. Ones like Fortnite or World of Warcraft that are more game oriented have less of that. The company is doing more of the content in the game oriented ones, but the more open ended ones actually share a lot with things like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter in that it's based on a user generated model where the company isn't creating most of the content.

The interesting distinction with something like Second Life, and this shows up with the game worlds as well is the current corporate model around the metaverse, the sort of two big paths, the two main ways that they make money is either advertising or subscription based, and a lot of games are more subscription or purchase based. So you buy Zelda: Breath of the Wild for $59 or you buy League of Legends or you buy Red Dead Redemption or whatever. You purchase the game or you pay $10 a month for it or whatever, and Second Life is free but to own land, you pay a monthly fee, so it's also subscription based, and that's one model. And then the other model is the advertising based of the free things like Facebook or Instagram. And what's interesting is that with the subscription model, and they both have whatever, pluses and minuses, but with the subscription model, you don't get the surveillance capitalism kind of thing.

Second Life doesn't care if your identity is different and they aren't tracking everything you do and spend, and the online games aren't doing that in the same way as well. Animal Crossing isn't doing that in the same way because you pay 50 bucks to have Animal Crossing. That's how they make their money. And so those are the two main forms that it is taking and both of those can use the user generated content model. So Facebook does it or Twitter does it and their advertising based, where something like second life does it but they're more subscription based. Online games are more subscription based. It's more of a Netflix model in that sense. And so it's going to be something very interesting and important to watch moving forward is what are the effects of those different commodity models? One subscription, one advertising. And then we can sort of make a grid, how does that then interact with the degree to which a virtual space is using a user generated content model or a company made model?

And there's an in between model that even Second Life uses a lot that a lot of these places use, and this shows up even with things like YouTube nowadays where between the company and the average user is the content creator or the influencer. So you have the idea that because like in Second Life, I mentioned that person who creates clothes and sells them or whatever, we're talking one or 2% of people in Second Life who are doing that kind of thing, and then there's a bunch of people who just hang out and buy the clothes. Think about YouTube. You have people who make a lot of money doing YouTube videos and they aren't employees at the company, but they are paid actually, some of them a lot and then you had the average person who watches it.

So you have a kind of hybrid third model that is showing up in a lot of these spaces where it's not the company making it the stop, like Nintendo for Animal Crossing, you get the rollout of the new content they're making, or the user, the average person making everything like tweets or Facebook posts, where you have this in between kind of semi-professional position of the content creator or influencer who's not an employee of the company, but in many cases, is paid by the company or by the users and often ends up creating most of the core content so the company doesn't have to and the average user doesn't either, and it's the average user that levels up. Maybe they get into it and they become content creators. So it's interesting how that model has also emerged as a third model, and how will these different models shape what happens socially is a really interesting area to be looking out for as we're watching what happens with these things moving forward.

Liam: For sure. Is that one of the things that we can expect in your work on the metaverse?

Tom at his desk in Second Life

Tom: Probably. I'm still figuring out where I will go with that, but all these things I'm mentioning are things that I probably will be looking into. What are the different models out there? What are some unexpected models that are out there? What are some possibilities that we can look at with these things? Because Jaron Lanier, who's very well known sort of coined the term virtual reality, and one of his books talks about the idea of lock in, that we still type HTTP for a website or we still talk about a desktop with folders and that kind of thing, and that once a format gets locked in, it can be influential for years and decades. And so it can be really important to be asking these kinds of questions and doing this kind of research now while the stuff is a little more unstable and emerging, and we can try to steer it and think about how can we do it better, rather than wait until things get locked in and one format or one company wins out.

And then we see now with things like Facebook where it's way more difficult to change it once it is so dominant and locked in, that it's hard to imagine an alternative and it's hard to imagine how it would be implemented, even if we imagine it once something has become so dominant. And so I think it's really important to be having these conversations and thinking about these possibilities while things are still a bit more emerging and unstable and there's the potential to steer the conversations in ways before that lock in happens.

Liam: All right. Well thank you again, Tom, for joining me.

Tom: You're most welcome. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

BJ Best, Poet, ArtyBots

Poet BJ Best on teaching computers to do what humans can’t.

In this episode, Liam speaks with BJ Best, a poet who teaches computers to do what humans can’t in the name of art. His network of ArtyBots is part of a vibrant scene of robots creating, sharing, and collaborating with one another on virtual art. In the interview, Best describes the reflective opportunities and editorial impact created by a bot-created body of work numbering in the tens of thousands.

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Liam Spradlin: BJ, welcome to Design Notes.

BJ Best: Thank you very much.

Liam: So to start out with, tell me a little bit about your current work and the journey that led you there.

BJ: Yeah, certainly. My home discipline as I like to call it is poetry specifically, but recently I've been very interested in how computers can media art in a variety of contexts. Growing up, I was always interested in computers and am kind of a self taught programmer. I learned how to program using basic. And I was always interested in the way computers think and of course that's kind of a misnomer, computers themselves don't think, but they can do surprising things that, um, otherwise, humans can't. BJ: And so I always enjoyed dabbling, but it feels like only recently computers have become both accessible enough and also powerful enough where people like me, who don't quite know how to program entirely, are able to use them, um, in a variety of contexts in order to generate content. And so in the past couple years, I've used computers to generate art in a variety of ways. Um, procedurally generated music, I've created procedurally generated video game, I've worked with poetry and artificial intelligence and then, uh, the arty bots project to make computer generated art.

Liam: So, tell me a little bit about arty bots. What is that and how did you get started on that specific project?

BJ: Yeah, so arty bots is a Twitter account itself, but it's also the kind of umbrella term for a family of Twitter bots, all of which create visual art in a variety of ways. They're mostly abstract bots 'cause it's difficult to create representational art through mathematical equations.

Again, I was interested in the idea of how computers can do something that humans can't, and specifically when I talk about humans, I'm mentioning myself (laughs) uh, because I have very little artistic ability in any sort of traditional state. I cannot draw, I cannot paint, I've attempted these things and the results are fairly comical (laughs) as a result. But I love art and I love the possibilities of creating art and specifically I love modern, post-modern art, particularly bright colors abstract art, and that seemed to me like the sort of thing that a computer could do fairly well.

And so I got this idea in my head maybe I want to use a computer to make art. And so after a lot of searching around on the internet, I was able to find people who had ideas about how to do this and I was able to find some sample code as well, which helped make this to be a reality. After that I had to learn, uh, these bots are written in Python, I had to learn Python. I'd never done anything in Python before, and I wound up stealing codes from other people both to start making the art and then the second part, which is to create the image, but then also post it on Twitter in order to make it a complete bot.

And then once I had bots that were posting images, I figured it made sense to have them reply to each other as well with the various algorithms that were programmed within each individual bot. Liam: So you created these bots that are now creating visual art and I think there's an interesting question here, which is are the bots artists? Are you an artist? Is it both? Is it neither?

(laughs) I, I think it's both, although I would prefer to credit the bots maybe more than myself and I think the cool thing about the bots and the thing that might make them artists is that they can do things humans simply can't. The bots treat an image pixel by pixel as something and so most of 'em are 500 by 500 and so you can do the math and it would be very difficult for a human to concentrate on that number of individual squares and have each one be meaningful in some ways. A computer, of course, can run through a grid like that very, very quickly.

So example, for one bot, it's called Arty Abstract and it's one of my favorites and it paints very abstract pictures based on mathematical equations. Um, it uses things like sines a lot and cosines and other limits and logs and all sorts of interesting things to create an equation and for every color on the canvas and in computers, colors are usually defined by three different variables, I always use RGB, red, blue and green. Each one of those has a complicated mathematical equation and so each red value, green value and blue value are calculated by these equations and then each single picture is plotted. To ask a person to do that seems like that'd be remarkably difficult thing.

And so I think they are artists in the sense that they can do something that humans can't and ultimately they're the ones that are creating the pictures. Obviously I... there's a human behind it choosing the code, choosing the equations, but like I said, without the computer, I would be unable to present any sort of image like this and I feel they kind of have a life on their own in terms of the things they're able to create that someone through traditional techniques would not be able to.

Liam: I'm very interested in the definition of a concept like art and the definition of a perhaps more specialized kind of art called design. And so I think it's something that everyone has a different answer for but I want to know, like, does this method of creation or the creators themselves, do these things inform or change your conceptualization or the broader conceptualization of what art is?

BJ: I think it has to in some ways because up until this point in history, with some exceptions, the idea that there could be something that could do calculations and that could present something that looks like art were limited in a variety of ways. And especially as we approach things like artificial intelligence, my thoughts are pretty simple compared to artificial intelligence. It's surprising what AI can create that looks in some ways to either realistic things or perhaps more artistic than just pretty colors in terms of pixels on a screen.

That being said, it does really challenge the idea that is it possible that only humans can make art and what forms of art are acceptable? I know the challenge of claiming an art is created by a Twitter bot is that tweets kind of by their nature are very ephemeral. You see it for a moment, you either like it or you just scroll right by it and then for all intents and purposes it's gone.

Most of these bots, I was doing some brief research, most of these bots have tweeted around 60,000 times, more or less. Uh, the arty bo- arty bots bot itself is, is over 100,000. And each one of those is a picture. And so the question because, well, what do you do with so much art? (laughs) As opposed to should you go into a museum and a museum might have a lot of pieces, for example, but it's no where on the order of 60,000 different things you could conceivably look at.

For me, personally, there is this interesting idea too, that you can take any image created by one of these bots and present it on a wall, on a canvas, and I've done that. Recently I had a show about computer mediated art with a colleague of mine, Joel Matias who's a musician and we both created computer mediated art and one of the things on the walls of the gallery that we created was a conversation of arty bots and so I took 15 canvases created by arty bots and hung them on a wall in a very traditional setting.

And so that kind of further confuses the idea of something that otherwise is ephemeral and to give it to sanction of printing it out, putting it on canvas and hanging it on a wall.

Liam: You made a point about the fact that each of these bots has tweeted out thousands of times and created thousands and thousands of works each and I'm interested besides sampling one conversation, if this huge output somehow forms a larger collection are a cohesive body of work overtime? Are there through lines in these works or do they tell some kind of story or is there an additional meaning that's created through this constant additive process?

BJ: The analogy I think that makes the most sense to me is the idea of a museum or a collection that someone might have and that this is just a very, very, very large (laughs) collection of a variety of pieces and yet they're all done by the same artist, so to speak, and they're done by people in conversation.

Now, honestly that's a great question because I still don't know what to do with the idea of what would you do with 65,000 pieces of art? And that's just one bot and the number of bots is in the teens now and so again, the math quickly multiplies.

I'm not sure because it's challenging to say that the bots have grown or developed because the algorithms that I've devised haven't really changed. Once I think something works, I just let it go and, um, the oldest of these bots is now older than four years old which is actually comparatively ancient in terms of Twitter times and Twitter bot times. And so in some ways I like to think of it as the bots are continuing to do themes and variations of what they've done all along. But I do think it's important to think about, that these bots have had a long lifespan and enough interaction with each other and with other visitors that like to come and see them that there is something more cohesive and more important, that the sum is greater than its parts rather than just one pretty image that one tweeted out once upon a time.

Liam: Talking about this indirect or procedural process of art creation, I'm reminded of something maybe mechanically simpler, but no less sophisticated which is some of Sol LeWitt's work, which the work that a visitor or a gallery goer might see is actually the result of the gallery following instructions for how to paint the gallery walls and I wonder if you also consider the code or the procedure behind these works to be a type of art itself.

BJ: Yes, uh, I was thinking about that as well and I agree with you 'cause I think the similarities are very strong. The code is simply a set of instructions and then I'm asking the computer to carry them out in, again, complex ways or going pixel by pixel down the screen. I do think code can be art. I'm a little hesitant (laughs) to call my own code art though, and it's often because I feel like I'm mucking around and trying to create something almost sometimes to the point where I don't quite understand how it works. And again, as I mentioned, I often steal code that I find online because I don't quite know how to make something work and I'm very grateful to people who post examples online that I think I can take work and tweak and figure it out.

So personally I find my code to be, you know, they call it spaghetti code and I do (laughs) not follow best practices in a lot of ways which I'm sure will haunt me at some point. That being said, I do think there's an art to good coding and I think the people who can do it well, it is an art form because it's, it's working in concert with the machine to make the machine do something, um, incredible and very well. But it is a collaboration. Um, and the most basic example would be a random number generator. Any time you ask a computer to roll a die, you never know what number it's gonna come up with, and in theory you could do that yourself but the numbers a computer can generate are huge and it's so easy for it to do that you need that collaboration and you need the code to make that happen.

Liam: I also want to talk a little bit more about how the bots interact with one another because they are kind of replying to each other and passing these pieces back and forth and doing different things to them, but they also talk to each other as well and seem to have their own little personalities and I'm really interested in what that adds to the whole space.

BJ: Definitely. Each bot is its unique thing and really each bot only does one thing hopefully well, and that's all it can ever do. So for example, Arty Wins is a bot that treats an image as if it were pixels and the pixels were grains of sand and so it simply blows some pixels across the screen and creates these kind of weird wispy structures. Arty Triangle is a bot that looks at an image that it receives and reduces it to a nice ordered set of triangles or other shapes that can be made out of triangles, parallelograms for example.

And so yes, these bots go back and forth and they can send images and every once in awhile it will go from a conversation it's having with one of the other ones and at a moment's notice say, "Okay, I'm done talking to you, I'm not going to go talk to somebody else."

But yeah, because it's a tweet, it's not just the image, there needs to be some text that goes along with it and each bot has a little bit of its own personality or tweets out some information about what it just did. Most of the bots I've created are pretty whimsical in their personalities. They love puns, uh, for (laughs) better or worse about whatever they have to do, so there's a lot of triangle puns for Arty Triangle, for example and abstract puns for Arty Abstract.

But generally they're pretty jovial over all in dealing with each other and I think overall that helps create this idea of whimsy that these bots have that they can generate these fun beautiful little images and hopefully guide the viewer into that kind of space that this is meant to be fun and it's meant to be beautiful and it's meant to be something to brighten up Twitter, which as we all know can otherwise sometimes be a darker (laughs) contentious place.

And that kind of whimsy is something I actually see in a lot of bots that are on Twitter that create art or play with text or do something like that. There's a sense of playfulness, um, that a lot of Twitter bots have and that's something I really enjoy about them because it's fun to play with the computer and it's fun to see what a computer can come up with and also identify how a computer is also not human and there's something inherently funny about watching a computer attempt to do human things and not always succeed in a normal way.

Liam: I wanna talk a little more about the place that the bots occupy on Twitter because arty bots is just one family in a landscape of Twitter bots that has grown enormously and become really large and I'm curious if there's something about Twitter as a conceptual space that helps this scene exist or grow?

BJ: Yes, definitely. I mean, Twitter is, as a company and a platform is pro-bot. Right now, if you sign up for a developer account that gives you access to the APIs to create bots basically, one of the options you can choose is I'm creating this account in order to create a bot. A lot of other social media platforms do not want bots. And so Twitter just definitely has a more open and welcoming attitude. And particularly it's happy if you identify whatever you've created as such. If it's a parody account, they want you to identify that. Um, all my bot accounts are clearly identified as bots and, and not really people sitting there scribbling anything.

And so, Twitter welcomes it. I also think the other aspect of Twitter is its brevity. It encourages people to do small, weird little things in a small space and since Twitter is designed around the idea of a small space, the ability to experiment and do weird little experimental things I think is encouraged just by the fact that it is, is designed to be small.

Um, there are bots that tweet out weird little sentences, um, that they've created through some sort of algorithm. There's several bots that I enjoy that use emoji to create either a landscape, uh, one creates an art gallery, um, or they use Unicode characters. There is one that creates a little desert for example. And so all these small, little things, as little respites around all of the other noise of Twitter, I think work very well on a platform that's designed for small things.

Liam: There's something about the intentionality of creating a bot and even a language that we use to talk about bots that's making me want to separate this idea into as many small layers as possible and to inspect them all, so another layer that came to mind is that you are creating the code that creates this bot and the bot creates the art and then art can have many layers in itself based on the quantity and the nature and all of those kinds of things. But, the bot as an entity is also its own layer. Like we've conceptualized these as discrete entities somehow and I'm interested what you think about that.

BJ: Definitely. And again, it kind of goes to the dialogue that, you know, I've written and really they only cycle through the five puns that they have or anything, but you do kind of wind up anthropomorphizing them a little bit and thinking about them as their own beings. Another bot is called Arty Crush and it crushes the colors of images down to only eight colors and basically what it does is it pegs the red, green and blue, either to zero or 255, 255 being the max. And when you do that for all the permutations you wind up with eight colors.

The joke about that is that it makes it look like a very old school kind of computer image back when computers could only display four colors on their monitors. As a result, it's, that particular bot has a personality where it doesn't believe in anything past basically Windows 3.1. In fact, it hasn't even upgraded to Windows 3.1 yet.

And so, they are like they are entities and again you could program them to say whatever you would like, but even within them, they feel like they have individual personalities and it's difficult, I think, in some ways, to not think of them as people, which is strange and I don't mean people in the typical sense but perhaps as intelligences, even if they're intelligences that only do one very specific task. And now I don't know if we simply have a penchant for that and as people we like to humanize things and perhaps things we might not understand or if it's due to the particular dialogue.

But not just my bots but other bots too often have some sort of text that makes it sound like they are someone in additional to something and sometimes it's just as simple as a bot saying hi, uh, in response or something like, uh, your image is ready or here's what you asked for or something like that. But it implies there's a speaker there that's more than just the program itself.

Liam: Speaking of the things that we've encoded into these bots and also the things that we pick up from them in terms of their humanity or beingness, whether it's there or not, arty crush is perhaps averse to software updates. I'm wondering if bots can make their own editorial statements through the art that they create.

BJ: Yeah, I think there's kind of two layers there. One, and this is true of all bots and AI too is that your own interests and predilections are coded into them. And so for me, I love bright colors and I love abstract things and therefore I've coded bots that can do those things that I can't. You know, I love big, loud things and at some point some of the images they created are garish, frankly. And so, the personality of the creator winds up being in these bots and it will always reveal whatever it's created. There are a couple of bots out there that generate landscapes in a very soft way. Um, soft, uh, neutral colors, very closely related and they draw mountains. It's a very different experience than looking at one of my bots, which is loud and colorful. Those kind of bots are far much more contemplative experience.

On a larger level though, one of the things I like about the bots is simply the profess the value of creating art and constantly creating art. And the nice thing is that these bots, as long as they run, are not subject to any outside commentary, political movements or anything. All they're doing is creating art and it does not matter what's happening in the outside world, it doesn't matter what's politically happening in the US or the world or economically happening. By god, they are (laughs) gonna create art and they will do it on and on and on ad infinitum.

And I think there's something powerful in that idea that we might be able to learn from that which is we always have the ability to create and try to create something beautiful in the face of whatever external pressures we might be up against at the time. And, and so in some ways, I think these bots do have a, a vague sentiment, a vague political sentiment that art is meaningful, art is valuable and it is important to continue creating it regardless of whatever else is going on in the world.

Now, that might be a little heady and coming on a little strong but I do think there's some sort of idea there and I think that is a bit of an editorial commentary about the value of art and particularly in a platform like Twitter, which is a wash with politicians and celebrities that it's important to do other things, like create art.

Liam: That kind of leads into the next question that I have which is about your poetry and also the other work that you've made that's mediated by either code or AI and I'm interested specifically in the AI mediated poetry and how that intersects with the work that you've done that is not mediated by computers and how the meaning of that work is augmented by collaboration with computers.

BJ: Yeah, so what I've done is I've long been interested in how computers can write language and up until very recently, attempts to do that were pretty simple and followed simple templates and you could pretty easily tell what algorithms were being used and they wound up being very repetitive after a while.

With the rise of AI, all of the sudden computers can perform much more fluidly and write language that looks much more human than ever before. In fact, in the past, I tried to write a computer program that would write language based on frequency of letters of it wound up just writing this gibberish, like a Scandinavian language with a lot of vowels and things like that. (laughs) And so not very effective.

But, I discovered an AI library called Torch RNN and what Torch RNN does is it studies language. It knows nothing about language, but it studies a text and treats each character as a point. And so very similar to the arty bots in some ways, rather than looking at pixels, it's looking at individual characters. So that includes letters but it also includes things like spaces and punctuation.

And so I fed my own writing from the past 20 years into Torch RNN and the theory is if it studies it long enough it will start to be able to write words and also phrases, sentences, that look sort of like something that I may have written as my own poetry. And so it takes awhile to train the model so it can study all of this and figure out all the vectors between what letters go together but it was pretty cool. After awhile and after me dialing in the parameters pretty well, it started writing words and it started writing sentences and the sentences usually did not make logical sense, but it knew how to put a the in front of a noun, for example, or sometimes how to put a verb in the right place.

And it was very surprising to watch a computer kind of spit language back out. So what I wound up doing is taking that output, which often had some good things and some just clearly gibberish things and sometimes it would not make up words at all and it would just be letters on a page, and shaping that into a poem and as a result I wound up getting many of these poems published and they're very odd creations in that they look like poems and much of the language is language we're familiar with as in their words and we know what they mean, but the computer has no idea what they mean. It just knows patterns and it throws words together in a very interesting set of combinations. Nouns become verbs and vice versa and it generates this very kind of surreal landscape of language that makes sense on an intuitive level but doesn't always make sense on a literal level.

It's a very collaborative process 'cause I'm editing whatever it generated and in theory the computer took my original words and did something with them but overall I definitely view it as a collaboration between software and myself because it wrote things I would have never thought to write, it created words, it created images I would never have written myself and together we've created this strange dream scape, uh, in the form of poetry.

Liam: Have you ever been surprised by maybe some of the reflective opportunities or ideas that have been presented in these poems?

BJ: Definitely. That's my favorite part about working with these is how the computer program's gonna use language and how I can do that. And again, my favorite examples are simply taking nouns and turning them into verbs or vice versa. One example is sometimes it learned the word sword and I have no idea what poem I used the word sword in, but it wrote the line I'm sworded by your love and I don't exactly know what that means but I love the idea of taking a sword and somehow using it as a verb and applying it to how one might feel about loving somebody else. I'm sworded by your love. And that seems pretty powerful and pretty meaningful even though I can't quite literally articulate it.

Yeah, and I mean there's a hint of violence there but there's also a hint of just being cleaved by someone, that's how much you love them. And you know, we have the, uh, more connotations of sword as perhaps nobility, or that I'm willing to fight for you. There's a lot of things that we can bring to bear on that line (laughs) but yet it's not 100% clear exactly which one might be the right one.

For me, that was the most exciting part of this is using words and using lines that might mean something but that I don't quite know what they mean. You know, through our daily lives and all throughout school we're taught to write something and write clearly and write and have a point and it was very liberating to work with a thing here, a computer, that knew nothing about any of those rules. All it knew was mathematical patterns between letters and it created language that looked real but wasn't. Liam: I'm going to close by talking a little bit about the future of these sorts of creations and what direction this is all going in terms of the surprising nature of the collaborations that we have when creating art with computers, the venues where those collaborations take place and everything in between.

As AI continues to advance, artists will find more and more ways to incorporate it into their work. There's a really cool program called Runway that I believe might still be in beta, I haven't checked recently, but basically Runway is a program intended for artists to use artificial intelligence without having to get into the nitty gritty of managing packages and learning computer languages and that sort of stuff. It's a really incredible program.

Recently, I'm going back to that gallery exhibit that I mentioned, my colleague and I created a work called Torch Zone and it was four piece computer mediated work. It started with one of these poems that I had written through Torch RNN. I fed those poems into a program in Runway. The AI package is called... I don't quite know how to pronounce it, it's ATTNGAN A-T-T-N-G-A-N. But what it does is you feed words in and it attempts to paint a realistic picture based on the words. So if you typed a dog on a beach, it attempts to create a photorealistic picture like that.

Of course the poems don't make much sense on a literal level and therefore when you feed those into such a program it creates just these wonderful dream scapes that look, again, quasi real but clearly are not a realistic situation.

My colleague Joel then took, uh, the image and used it to create music based on an algorithm he created and he also used it to create a 3D printed sculpture. And so when you think of these things just as data, it's pretty interesting to imagine how data can be applied through different media in order to create different forms of art.

Beyond that, artists will find the use in this and I think what I see in most of the bots on Twitter and artists who are interested is that disconnect, that uncanny valley between what could a human do and what does a computer do? Because no matter how close it gets, and it's getting better all the time, artistically it's still almost always possible to find when a computer's made something versus a human. And it's the computer's attempts to try to make something human that for me are the area of artistic interest. Um, it's something humans can't do and it teaches us something about how we are human compared to how we are machines.

Liam: Yeah, I guess anything that a human would do is automatically human, even if we aren't attempting to be human. (laughs)

BJ: Yes, and again, it's the idea that these programs are created by humans but they're harnessing powers that humans don't have and it lives within this very, you know, awkward and someway cyber space of if a human has control over a computer but a computer doesn't understand what it means to be human, where does that leave that communication?

Liam: Yeah, all right, well thank you again BJ.

BJ: Wonderful, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you

Kerry Murphy, Founder — The Fabricant

Kerry Murphy on how his virtual fashion house, The Fabricant, explores ideas of embodiment through clothing that can only exist in virtual space.

Liam speaks with Kerry Murphy, co-founder of digital fashion house The Fabricant, to learn how ones and zeros are spun, woven, and stitched into virtual couture. In designing couture that doesn’t—or can’t—exist in physical space, The Fabricant also explores ideas of embodiment and self-actualization. Murphy pushes these concepts even further, by interacting with his own “virtual twin,” composed from 3D-scans of his body.

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Liam Spradlin: Kerry, welcome to Design Notes.

Kerry Murphy: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Liam: To start out how I always do, I'm interested in what your journey has been like to your current work and how that journey has influenced the kinds of things that you're working on.

Kerry: So, my background is in film and visual effects and I worked in advertising for over a decade, and I felt that advertising industry is a little bit solace and doesn't necessarily have a purpose in most of the work that we do. And I think I was always searching for purpose in my work. And basically, I just happened to make one animation test with clothing, and it was a complete miserable fail. And through that, I established conversation with some fashion designers, who happened to be digital fashion designers, to basically see how I can animate clothing in much better way, only to realize how far fashion industry is from actual digital transformation 'cause I thought that all fashion designers are designing in 3D software these days, but it happened that it's only the start of the digital transformation of fashion industry currently.

And there I just understood that the whole fashion industry is completely unsustainable, very toxic environmentally, and plus also culturally. So I saw that there was a lot of opportunity to change and I actually saw that there's a lot of opportunity to create that type of change through 3D and fashion because basically if you completely democratize the design practices into digital practices you can be basically saving a lot of materials and waste in the process itself. So meeting up with my current co-founder Amber, who's a, let's say a true Visionary when it comes down to creating that digital change in the fashion industry, it gave me a new opportunity to basically start a 3D animation company focusing completely on fashion. So I think that's basically the short story of how I came about going from visual effects to becoming a fashion design company.

Liam: So you talked about using 3D and digital to reduce waste in the process of creating fashion, but I also want to get into what digital couture is.

Kerry: (Laughs) Well, I mean, if you look at the word couture, it only means sewing, then this of course, haute couture which is like this high-end luxury fashion which is only like I think 30 companies in the world can call themselves haute couture companies. So digital couture is basically the exact same, uh, couture on its own but basically we're doing digital sewing. So we don't use any material samples in the design process whatsoever. Our whole design process is in 3D software and digital couture.

Liam: And how is that work eventually consumed?

Kerry: Oh, I mean, the case change his quite a lot with it because it's digital clothing, so essentially it's not something that you wear on your physical body and it's not something that keeps you warm. We believe that all lives are becoming so virtual these lives that at some point people will actually want to start dressing their virtual identities. And what I mean by virtual identities right now that can be your Instagram profile picture, your Facebook profile picture, your LinkedIn profile picture, but in the future we believe that everybody will have a digital twin of themselves that they will actually want to do create in in a certain way that will go with their identity which we believe it's going to be somewhat different from a physical identity.

The way we identify ourselves in our physical world of course, it's much more limited than in a virtual world. The way we speak on social media is different way that we speak in our physical lives, and we believe that digital clothing is just gonna be a big tool and a vessel to create our digital identities and to communicate to our peers, our different communities, our friends, our family, you name it.

Liam: The distinction between our physical embodiments and the virtual identities that we have is really interesting, especially thinking about how that idea is already manifesting where we're using the physical aspects of our embodiment to create that digital twin that the you mentioned. And I think right now from what I understand when someone buys a piece of digital couture they still need help putting it on because it's still being put onto some representation of their physical embodiment. So I'm wondering do you think that that will change in the future, that the tools that we have for creating these will be such that will be doing that ourselves?

Kerry: Absolutely. I think I always use this example from the film industry because I have to go to university for several years to learn all the tools, and cameras, and editing software, and I really was proud of the fact that I knew all of these tools that nobody else really knew around me. And then with the first smartphone now everybody's basically a filmmaker, everybody has a camera in their pocket, and editing tool in their pocket. YouTube is a great distribution tool, you know, you can basically be marketing all your videos. So it's really the age of consent making and the smartphone has democratized that.

And we're on the same path to create that for fashion basically. We want to enable everybody to have a digital avatar of themselves so they got actually wear digital clothing. We want to make clothing for our lives, our identities, and the question then is what is that experience, what is that tool that enables everybody to live in the virtual realm and allows everybody to be a content maker? We want to be co-creators where we actually bring that fashion craftsmanship as it exists today in the physical world, bring it into the digital space and make those tools that allow everybody to think along and create garments with them for them for their virtual use.

Liam: I'm also interested in, again, this idea of, of having a virtual embodiment and trusting it and having that represent you online, because I think that the initial conceit of social media was that this person who's posting is a representation of you authentically. So when that is maybe less the case, or it's more accepted that these embodiments have capabilities that we don't in the physical world, how does that act of creating your virtual self end up interacting with your real self?

Kerry: No, it's a good question. I think the immediate answer would be, let's say an augmented reality of, um, overlaying digital items on top of our physical lives. So if we talk about it from that perspective, that, okay, everybody's going to have AR contact lens, not that it's like my favorite future, but if that is the case, and then everybody could be wearing digital clothing in their physical lives as well. I think what the blurring between the two right now is I would say the smartphone, we already have AR filters on smartphones. The face filters for Instagram is super popular. And I think a lot of the people that we engage with have asked like, "Oh yeah, when are we going to make the body filter for Instagram for clothing?" Of course, there's a lot more complexities when it comes down to the technical execution of that, but we're starting to see it already.

Uh, I think one of our partners Carlings who also did a digital fashion campaign last year, that was immensely popular, they just released a Instagram filter to go together with their physical t-shirt. So basically you go to Instagram and you open up their filter function and you scan the logo on the t-shirt itself, and then the Instagram filter places a graphic on the t-shirt. So that's already layering a digital layer on top of the, of the physical body, but you still need that medium, which right now is the smartphone. So I think a lot of the answers are going to lie there. And when we talk about the fabric and let's say 100 year vision, I think it was Amber who mentioned at first that she was imagining that we all be wearing holograms, that were basically wearing a basic body suits and on top of that, they will be a form of a hologram on top of us. Technologically, right now that's not really possible, but we can't even imagine what we'll look like a hundred years from now. So I can completely imagine that our clothing can be completely digital at some point.

Liam: Focusing on the creation of digital clothing, in past conversations when I've talked to folks who are working on physical garments, we talk about things like how the garments move, how they drape over a body, how they fit and the texture of the material, things like that. I'm interested in what those are in a virtual environment. What are the constraints, if any, or like what kind of parameters are you thinking about?

Kerry: Good question. I mean, for us, the language is the exact same. We talk about drape, fit, stitches, seams, materials. I think that's basically 80% of the conversation, but we talk about it from a technical pipeline perspective. How do we insert the stitches from our 3D fashion software to our professional software? You know, we're, we're trying to create a pipeline where somebody says, "I want to top stitch there," that that stitch gets automated throughout that whole technical pipeline. So I think that's a little bit of a different part of the discussion, but we also say that we take the language of fashion craftsmanship, and we just do the digital craftsmanship side of it.

So basically it's the same type of craftsmanship, just in a different space. The way we construct stuff is completely different. So when I go to fashion universities and I see these kids there basically with their sisters and their paper patterns, cutting patterns out, kind of reminds me of how film industry was before the '90s that, you know, there was an editor cutting a spool of film, you know, pasting it back together only to check how the edit works. That's kind of where fashion is right now. But when you look at the 3D software itself, you basically have two layouts. You know, one, one side of the window is to draft your 2D pattern, and the other side of the window is to draft the 3D volume, where you basically 3D stitch it together to create the 3D volume of the garment itself.

Now, I don't know exactly how much faster that is, but I can tell you that you're not going to be able to put a physical t-shirt together in two minutes, what's possible basically in 3D. So I think that whole ideation process, that whole design process from a creative perspective becomes so much more powerful because basically you can put your ideas down in 3D almost as fast as you can sketch them down on paper. Within a day, you can go through hundreds of different ideas, color ways, uh, details, uh, blocks, silhouettes, something that typically can take weeks, if not months, to put together in the physical world.

Liam: I'm interested also in the new material possibilities afforded by virtual fashion and what it's like to invent a new material and think about how, how it exists on its own and also how it interacts with the environment and maybe with other virtual materials as well.

Kerry: That's probably my favorite part of the whole process itself is to actually create stuff that's not possible in the physical world. And I believe that's where 3D actually provides the most value for fashion, is to actually do stuff that you will never be able to do physically because of gravity, for instance. Uh, w- with materials, you get to play around a lot with it. It does need to be much more technical and a little bit more engineering type minded from a different perspective to actually ideate and be super creative.

And I guess in 3D, the rule is as long as it looks good, it's good. Oh, at least you need to be able to get some type of emotional engagement out of it. You know, it can be super ugly, it can be super beautiful, as long as you're creating something that resonates and that has visual appeal in one way or another. And again, it's the same thing, you know, you get to play around and try hundreds of different things within a day. Unlike fashion, if you're going to talk about material innovation, you know, can be months, if not years before you're coming up with something that's visually appealing to actually put on the clothing itself.

Liam: I also wanna talk about how people are responding to, uh, these, to these products right now, both as they see things like digital installations that are showing off new garments, or when they actually see themselves or a representation of themselves wearing these garments?

Kerry: It is still a very niche that not many people have a virtual representation of themselves yet alone, a photorealistic representation of themselves in 3D. So not many people have gone through that process of actually getting an avatar of themselves and putting digital clothing on themselves. But this is something that I already did in 2017, as a proof of concept for myself to see how the process goes from technical perspective, only to find out that there was a real, let's say, psychological aspect to it as well. First of all, having to do the body scanning half naked and knowing that I was going to put those results out into the web was kind of scary and yeah, kind of hit my own insecurities in a lot of different ways.

But then the learning that came through, it was actually a lot about body positivity. I started seeing myself in a 360 view and I started understanding how my body works. And then when a digital fashion designer was tailoring digital clothing on my body, and she put clothing on to my body that I wouldn't wear necessarily my physical life, my first reaction was like, "No, I would never wear that." But my second reaction was like, "But hey, what if? How would I feel?" So all of a sudden I started becoming much more open to things that I was not necessarily open for before. And I was kind of able to start breaking those, let's say, stereotypical barriers that I had set for myself, uh, throughout my life, just by being able to observe myself from a third person perspective in the 3D space, doing dance moves that I can't do in my real life, wearing clothing that I would never, ever actually want to wear in my real life to actually start thinking of like, "Hey, what if?"

So, I actually started taking dance lessons to, you know, try different things out, to express myself differently from a creative perspective. And I can just basically, you know, matrix style, almost just upload different dance moves on my body and really just look at myself doing crazy stuff that I can't do in my physical life in third person perspective. It really... There is something like super strong from a psychological perspective that's very hard to put into words. It's just something that people will need to experience for themselves. And I believe that in the future, we're definitely moving towards that space where a lot of other people will start seeing themselves in third person perspective through these avatars. Eventually, I think everybody will have that one-to-one translation of themselves in virtual life, and beyond that they will actually want to start curating their virtual avatars in ways that don't look like themselves, but something that they can still emotionally connect to, something that resonates with their own identity.

Liam: Right. As you were saying that I was thinking a lot about a book by Tom Boellstorff who did an ethnography of second life. And I think earlier when I asked about the interaction between our virtual avatars of ourselves and our physical presence, I was thinking a lot about how other people will experience that. But it strikes me that as Boellstorff says in his book, a lot of the things about the act of creation and second life and about the act of creation of your avatar specifically is about self-actualization, and maybe this is the same thing. The outcomes that you're getting from it are not so much about how they impact your physical embodiment with regard to other people, but how you are able to perceive yourself and understand yourself.

Kerry: It's so powerful to be able to basically just put yourself into a safe space and observe yourself from a distance to kind of see what is it that you do. It's, it's, it's almost just another layer to when you first hear your own voice, or when you first see yourself on video, or when you first see a picture of yourself, this is just like another elevated format of that.

Liam: There is an interesting idea that I came across when I was researching fabricants work, and that was that data can be used as a raw material for creativity or creative work. What's meant by that?

Kerry: Well, just like cotton is a raw material that basically that's where it starts for us. Data is our raw material because all of our work happens in the PC. So we could just call that all of our work starts with ones and zeros, and it also ends up in ones and zeros, but in just a different format. And it goes through that whole process from going from raw ones and zeros to processed ones and zeros, I don't know exactly how to word it, but, uh, in the end, there is a visual output that in its essence is still ones and zeros.

Liam: So assuming that virtual couture and its new capabilities, which are personalization, collaboration, all of the sorts of things about this new virtual embodiment that we've talked about, and also including the possible future where we're wearing holograms and body suits that generate some sort of visual output for clothing, in the meantime, what do you think the impact is going to be on the world of physical fashion and systems by which it operates right now?

Kerry: I think there's gonna be a lot of change coming, and I think it's going to be very disruptive in a lot of ways. I think we're going to move more towards local manufacturing because basically we won't need that overstock anymore. We won't need to produce in high quantity because we're moving towards a production on demand business model where actually all the clothing can be 3D renders until the purchasing point. So once the consumer actually buys the clothing via e-commerce or online store, then that gets manufactured. But I also believe that that whole manufacturing process is going towards atomization, where robots will be making our garments. So that disruption, I think will be, let's say fairly destructive for a lot of countries.

And I hope that there will be companies and organizations who can make that transition as friendly as possible for the people that actually rely on that income on a daily base, because most of our garments are still handmade. It's still manual labor. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest things that some people in our network are asking us, what are we doing about that aspect? And honestly, I don't really know, you know, we're barely surviving as a company to begin with. So that will definitely have to be something that from an ethical perspective, we really need to take a stance on and to be aware of the type of change that can come through virtualization and hope that we can really help support that transformation when it comes down to the places that are very much relying on that physical production at the moment.

Liam: Right. Well, thank you again for joining me, Kerry.

Kerry: Cool. Thank you so much for having me.