Question for the Day
Gaston Bachelard, in his chapter on shells, speaks of a Bosch composition, in which the growing dream “of inhabiting all the hollow objects in the world” removes the tranquility of isolation and retreat in favour of the “frenzied joy” depicted by Bosch. He speaks of the shell as a place where we “must be alone. By living this image, one knows that one has accepted solitude.” When we’re sad, we want to live alone, a ‘dream’ shared by all peoples, yet Bosch’s shell presents a cocoon where a group shares in “feasting and carousing.”
In applying this to our work, will our ’new technologies’—the augmented and virtual realities which act as the ’shells’ of our world—participate in a collective ‘frenzied joy’ as depicted by Bosch, with group participation an increasingly essential element in their application, or will their use be contingent on the user’s removal from the communal in favour of accepted, perhaps inevitable, solitude?
—marko d.