Collaborative Process and Digital Technology

Ultimately collaborating is sharing.

There is a certain degree of courage that enters into the process where we surrender ourselves to the moment and others engaged in our creative work. There is an additional collaborator: Digital Technology. This new technology in is continual transfomation. For the first time we have a technology that objectifies and brings identity to collaborative process.

Digital technology has been making the virtual world an alternative to our visions of reality. We have speculated that each of us perceives our own different reality and the new technology has permitted us to construct our own virtual worlds. In addition, Internet creations are making new environments for exchange, and video games create virtual environments that often consume more time than one's conventional world.

Much of what is going is our teaching the machines how to become us. To the extent that we codify all of our actions, beliefs, dreams, and needs, such efforts create a database for the machine. That was essentially the state of reality that forms the major premise of the popular film The Matrix. Reality is reduced to conscious and unconscious perception.

Perhaps two qualities make digital technology almost irresistible: immediacy and spontaneity.Immediacy has formed an essential element for the World Wide Web. Even in the earliest days this was a medium responsive to our ideas as we published our webpages as soon as we finished, or as soon as we wanted. Often we published in spurts, and a page emerged as different versions of itself as we endlessly edited our chimerical inspirations.

As pages became interactive, we experienced a digital spontaneity that transformed images and text as we moused over the surface of the page. This spontaneous quality sent us searching for dynamic web environments. More and more, the digital environments of the WWW are changing, transforming and mutating into alternative worlds, inviting the visitor to explore the pages, images and text are clues to hidden treasures.

The illusion of parallel universes exist in this virtual context. Quantum Physics has uncovered eleven dimensions of our current reality. And even now, Physics has begun to explore the reality of parallel universes. Often human imagination anticipates new discoveries in the world of science. Perhaps our consciousness is the ever-changing reality that is revealed through our imagination. New realities lurk on the outskirts of our conscious awareness.