Today, I went to an art gallery. There was a cool exhibition on one of the floors that had on display, among many artifacts, an assortment of Polaroids, typed letters, handwritten notes and a few home videos. These tidbits had been collected from the lives of well-known artists like David Hockney, Andy Warhol and also from just regular people around the world.
Walking through this exhibit made me wonder what similarly-themed exhibits will look like a few decades from now. The majority of stuff we document now is digital. Unlike daily life relics from the past which we can touch, feel and visibly see signs of aging in, today’s artifacts exist in the cloud. The same underlying data can take the form of a website, a grid of files in a filesystem, a social media feed, a slideshow, a series of emails and so on. There is a considerable degree of interoperability of digital data while the need to print any of this stuff is rapidly reducing.
The visual presentation and consumption of most of today’s artifacts occurs via screens. Does that mean most of the galleries of the future will simply be corridors and corridors of screens?
Or at some point, will we just get tired of looking at digital bits all the time and instead will increasingly prefer things we can hold, touch and smell? Kind of like how there is a growing subculture of young people bringing back Polaroids and 35mm film to document their lives.
One reason why I think that appeals to lots of people is how analog / physical objects of the past composed of atoms and molecules exude a lot more character. Like how an aged letter on A4 paper develops a yellowish tinge and can be folded and stuffed inside an envelope that has a very distinct design. Or a pen someone wrote with. Or a printed issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and the sound the pages make when you flip through.
But as our creation and consumption habits become more and more digital, the tools used by people of today and in the near future will increasingly be software. And the stuff we’ll be creating with those tools will be digital. In today’s world, in my opinion, the majority of software tools and the visual presentations enabled by them lack character, which makes me wonder whether an exhibition in the gallery of the future with artifacts from current daily life will be as enjoyable and exciting as the ones we can visit today.
That said, there’s much to be invented in this decade around VR/AR that it’s very early to tell what affordances will be possible around our data and what will presenting and consuming it will look and feel like. But my guess is that the form factors our data are visually presented in will be radically altered over the course of this decade.