Been thinking a lot about this subject since I got back from CLOC, about lifepaths, about how things end up in reality and about how to steer yourself minute to minute moment to moment. I don’t really know is the thing. I think, the further you go along in life, the more little rules and observations you make or assume about the world, and you just start trusting in those because they worked before. Or not quite, but it was easier than doing something else (what works best, versus best possible).

That mingled with some intermittent clouds of self-doubt (followed by periods of sunshine and cool breezes), comes hot on the heels of a dream I had recently on my way back to Baltimore. It relates to the cryptic 1509 post of mine from the other day. I had a dream where I was being followed unknowingly by a mysterious group of strangers, businessmen of some kind, who were seeking my help, wanting me to work for them on some big futuristic software project that could do all these unbelievable things. And I found out that the code name of their project was “1509″ because one of the lead guys, was wearing a grey sweatsuit with that number decorating the front.

And I’ve spent a lot of time with computers: teaching people how to use them, using them in creative professional capacities, using them to help other people make money, and really exploring them in my own ways as creative poetic instruments, really, not even as technology. There’s a Bukowski poem about him playing piano when he sits down to his typewriter. I feel that sometimes when I fire up the old laptop: that I’m making music, that I’m “playing the internet.”

I see this kind of thing as where advanced technology is going in the near and distant future: metaphors of grandeur, of beauty, of ridiculousness, of things that stretch the imagination to the brink of impossibility. Intel recently has been talking about “programmable matter” - but what is that really, if not a metaphor, a symbol of hope more than anything else. We’re a long way off (at least I think so) from being able to program a slice of matter to take on a specific shape, but someday we won’t be. Why not talk about it now, why not talk about it in a way which is very public and inclusive and which weaves together narratological strands from many different metaphors, viewpoints and filters.

Ultimately, that software is ourselves, or at least how we perceive the world, our experiences of it, of ourselves, of one another. The Holy Grail of computing (and I think we’re near the end of the “Computer Age”, soon they won’t look like that anymore and that metaphor will seem foolish) should be to build a system which gets out of people’s way, which adapts to them and helps them make themselves better as individuals, as communities, as holons within a cross-section of delicately balanced eco-systems and energetic networks.

So that’s one thing I want to explore and talk about and engage people with. And I want to be able to actively tie that in - in a very experiential way - to things like performance, to ritual, to habit formation and re-formation, to mastering yourself and acting as a positive force within your community. The theatre, to me, is the perfect and most obvious metaphor for what scientists call the sensorium, the perceptual field we exist in, the field which takes on various states and flutters and shimmers and turns into different things around us. Programmable matter, taking charge of your life, harnessing the power of your experience. You as witness, me as make believe. Us trying it out anyway.