The Work of Matthew T. Marco and the Spazowham Design Group

Mark Shepard: I recently spent the afternoon in a garden at my favorite watering hole in Brooklyn and sat next to a couple who were chatting. The guy was constantly shifting his attention between his conversation partner and his new iPhone. Now it’s common when talking to someone to glance away periodically at other people or things happening around you (I would suggest this is a fundamental attraction of urban environments), but what’s different here is that Mr. iPhone’s attention is constantly shifting between virtual and actual modes of presence. To me, the interesting questions are: What happens when the virtual and the actual are not understood in terms of a strict dichotomy but rather a continuity or a gradient? How might we design for scenarios like this?

Adam Greenfield: I think of what’s happening in this scenario (and I agree, this is an almost paradigmatic case) as a wholesale redefinition of adjacency.

—Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents.

While my visits to California aren’t rare, my two-week stay last winter has been the longest since I moved away, enough time to expand my itinerary beyond family and close friends to not only to visit with past acquaintances but, with some, to also superimpose physical, spatial relationships over evolving virtual relationships, adding dimensions of tone and motion to the plain text of emails. Enough time to not only gorge myself on the late-night fast food of my inner fat kid but to also pilgrimage to the Salk Institute, to deliver red velvet cake to the ailing, to dance at Harvelle’s on a Sunday night. To not only retrace a Los Angeles past but to discover the Los Angeles present.

And this is incidental music from that visit, that winter, the strangely progressive KROQ playlist as the sun rose over the 110 sound barrier just south of downtown on an early Saturday morning, the iPods of Murky Coffee baristas, tributes to Oscar Peterson, album cuts from second-hand finds at Lovell’s. It’s another chapter in my pop-music autobiography for download (and eventual plastic distribution), 18 songs over nearly 80 minutes, called (yeah seriously) Homewrecking.

My history aside (or probably integral), this isn’t so much about cuckolding as much as it is about a botched divorce from an entire status quo that’s willfully hurtful to the people who necessarily inhabit it. For as much as I fantasize of a life free from coding and production, the limits of my suburban upbringing, and geographic monogamy, there’s sense in sticking it out, building up savings, vesting in the retirement system, and earning my masters. And while it wouldn’t kill me to buck up in the meantime, I (more often than I’m comfortable) think I might regret this course of action in my financially stable but dreary future.

This unwillingness to make a definitive break, to recognize baggage as baggage, seems at odds with my personal crusade of reduction like an aerodynamic glider strapped to a bus. And it’s this imbalance of desiring, between that actual past of concentrated frivolity and the virtuality of distributed but stimulating relationships, a byproduct of that vacation, that’s been the motivating asymmetry of the past few months. That I find the affect-less timbre of Google Talk and Scrabulous conversations with old friends and distant acquaintances often more engaging than diurnal millennials in declining orbit seems a sign that the drudgery and dissipation of my days are just an indefinite prolonging of an even more vacuous existence.

I have this recurring dream where a close friend (likely one of you) and I find ourselves in a smallish, glamour-less room, low ceilinged and its floor dedicated mostly to a swimming pool, the walkable area of the space only a smooth but unpolished concrete border a couple feet wide. Oh, and the pool is filled with oranges instead of water.

I decide that the two of us should try to find the bottom of the pool, and you agree. Sometimes I dive in first and sometimes you do, and I wait at the surface for just a few moments.

“No luck. Your turn,” you say as you surface, and I dive in. I dig through oranges and more oranges and after a while they are colorless pebbled orbs, and soon after I can no longer sense the fragrance of oranges and dust. I wonder if you’re still at the surface, if you’ve left me here to dig through, if you could hear me if I called your name. And though I can still breathe and burrow, I push down oranges to pull myself to the surface and you’re still there. “No luck. Your turn,” I say and so you dive in again and I wonder this time if I’ll be able to hear your call for help, if you know to navigate by scent as well once you can’t sense light or sound or even touch, but then it all smells like oranges and dust. I wonder if you know which way is down. I pace the step-and-a-half between the wall and the pool’s edge, sometimes a few steps laterally, but always returning to the same position I stood so that when you return to the surface you won’t be disoriented. And this dive is longer than the first but you’re back. “No luck,” you say with bright diligence and so I dive in again, longer than the first time and deeper than the first time and so too the stream of thoughts of whether you’ve left the room or whether you’re bored or healthy or cursing me for drawing us into this task. First light then touch then sound then scent. I surface.

No luck. Your turn. It continues, each turn longer than the last. No luck, I’ve got nothing, no dice, keep digging. Your turn. It keeps going and it’s just oranges and oranges and oranges and dust. No luck, your turn. Pacing. No luck, your turn. Oranges and dust. And so on and never to the bottom of the pool. And then I wake up.

Some friends have tried to ascribe meaning to it, to re-draw the setting, but it’s resistant to change. It escalated in frequency in February and March, to the point where the imagined feeling of a pebbled rind of citrus fruit anywhere was enough to unsettle me, to provoke an involuntary twitch or grunt. Still, it never pitches me immediately into consciousness like a nightmare. Perhaps that’s the point.