Big Alberta Sky (Through Google Glasses)

Earlier this NHL season, quietly, teams started to experiment with a new form of advertising. It features a company's digitized logo superimposed not on the ice or the boards but on the back glass. Looks like:




Greg Wyshynski, writing in a Yahoo Sports article, raises and then backs away from the possibility that the new advertising somehow crosses a line. He asks: What makes the glass more sacred than centre ice? The use of the word sacred is a clue to Wyshynski's opinion. After all, not many anymore argue in favour or something because it is sacred. 


But, it's worth starting to think about. It does feel different. It's not like text on a page in a book where the page has a presence that is somehow more real than the letters printed on it. Sure, the back glass in a hockey rink has substance, but it is also transparent, not there, ethereal. 


In a way, like the sky. 


Recently, not quietly, Google has unveiled its Glasses initiative, a reality dream in wearable technology that changes what and how we see. The research sets the stage for the obsolescence of the hand-held cellphone, as touch surrenders to sight. Feels like: 




What I find intriguing is what happens to the sky at the :15 mark. Essentially, it is recreated as piece or end zone rink glass onto which is projected an icon of information. In the video, it is information around the current temperature, and that may feel innocuous. But the sky has changed. Is it hard to imagine seeing an Apple logo when you gaze up at the heavens? A reversal of gravity, as the apple, with a bite removed,  ascends to the sky?













Anticipating a question from Steve Mann, whose book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny And Human Possibilty In The AgeThat  Of The Wearable Computer, I am reading, I wonder if Google Glasses could be used to stop seeing advertising? 


           










I admit it: there are more Ian Tyson lyrics going through my head than the average person's. And what I'm hearing now, as I consider rink glass advertising, non-textual messaging, Google's taking over the sky, is, literally, the wonder of it all.


In The Wonder Of It All, Tyson muses on  the sense of sight, the passage of time, and the seeming inviolability of the sky:

The golden west has come and gone/
Right before our very eyes/
But they will never count the stars/
And they will never fence the skies. 

And, yes, you do wonder if someday soon we look back fondly to the old days when the sky was just the sky, free of the barbed wire of advertising.

shannonlawlor.com




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more