We are explorers of the digital plains, miners extracting bits in order to build new towers of light that only exist on the frontier of our electricity-amplified world. Numerically derived substances become emissive with properties that have been designed in the mind and transferred between one another like so much binary noise, making the transition from wet organic matter to traveling hair-thin strands of glass before riding a copper route to a box of transmogrified sand that allows me, the operator, to be a creator.
I harness the brains of countless people who have sacrificed banality in the effort to capture maths in such ways that they have become code, tools, and software that do stuff. My gratitude extends from Euclid and his theater of geometry to Galileo, who once said, “The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”
Today, digital artists are using those triangles, circles, and geometrical figures to construct dynamic environments that have pulled the masses into witnessing the illumination of the “dark labyrinth.” Video games, computer graphics, electronic music, and 3D animated films are but a ploy to pull humanity forward where the border of the known universe unfolds. Our ancestors first observed the work of fire before entrusting those “crazy” enough to play with it. Once made safe, everyone could utilize the dangerous but useful energy contained within. Today it is at our fingertips, and we think nothing of bringing it into our homes with a twist of a knob so it may cook our food.
Similarly, we have a pipe that now delivers the fire of the mind directly to our homes, and most of us have grown accustomed to its ubiquitous presence, not only via wire but in the very air around us. Like fire, the presence of information is not only used for the warming of leftovers, it can be used in the forging of the new from the unknown. It was fire that allowed us to make ceramics, glass, steel, electricity, propulsion systems, and much of what makes the world around us convenient. Now that electronic bits have made us comfortable in our surroundings, how will the exotic uses of that potentiality alter us going forward?
We must begin to comprehend the “next” word. That word is creation. It is what we humans do; we create. One does not need to be a God to enter this domain, just as one does not need to be the Shaman of the Fire in order to warm the home. The magic is no longer external; it is within. Within our minds and transmutable through our hands, we can bend, fold, and manipulate the flow of the visual universe. We are set to become the architects of this electronic domain in ways larger than our consumptive selves allow us to yet realize. The Age of Creativity stands before us, but the gulf of ability still looms as a chasm of uncertainty.
It is time to smash that divide to recognize it is our self-imposed and media-manifested doubts and fears that have erected the barriers between the consumptive self and the creative self. These past three decades of personal computing and the thousands of years of prior advancements have all been leading us to this point where humanity’s rarest tools and skills in the forms of knowledge and education are being offered to nearly all people. They arrive within the time it takes to understand that they are free or, at a relatively low cost, available to all. Software is the tool that lends each of us the brain trust of thousands, if not millions, of minds whose collective ability is brought to our front and center with a mouse click or a simple gesture.
Learning to read and create the universe with a visual and audible language that allows us to communicate across barriers is what our new digital tools are laying out before us. Complexity and creative fun can and will be synonymous. It is up to us to share our sense of amazement that is brought on when we employ these evolving digital tools of creativity.