radically transparent

for those of us working at the threshold of the physical and the digital, it can be frustrating when one just doesn’t match the other. as in hyperlinks, where one location or piece of data can be reached from a number of other places, without the concept of proximity or time-space continuity. virtual environments often suffer from the limitations of real physics; why would you go test drive a car on an island in second life when you can fly spacecraft on your game console? until now: the soon-to-come game portal really messes with your sense of space, and brings it closer to the information arrangement of the interweb. in this game, you have no weapons but you need to navigate impossible spaces, suppress enemy fire and defeat enemies with only a single tool: a portal gun that shoots an in- and an out- portal in your field of view. if you shoot a hole under a box and another over an enemy, the box will fall on the enemy. and so on… what’s inspiring to me about this game is that it finally approaches a physical metaphor for digital information. now time to work on physical portals.