Scalped

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. --Emily Dickinson

Ah, Emily. I haven't thought of you in a long while, but I'm thinking of you now, this Sunday morning after a Saturday excursion with Chris and the girls to the Salt Lake Art Center's  New Frontiers exhibit. Both Chris and I work a crazy schedule these days. Chris' business grows exponentially while he clambers to meet the needs of client families with authentic human interaction. I teach elementary school, am enrolled in a two-year master's level program working toward a reading endorsement, moonlight as a yoga instructor, and squeeze in my personal daily yoga practice to boot. Our kids have lives and extracurriculars going on, too. On the weekends we have to consciously force ourselves to let some of our stuff go and come together as a family. So we loaded the girls and a friend into the car and drove to the big city for a little culture.

The brain chemicals flooded my gray matter the moment I stepped into the gallery to view The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive Chrome HTML5 experiment, its music spewing from a highly placed speaker above the screen. I stood there, puzzled, while a fellow museum patron scribbled something onscreen using a laptop computer placed on a plinth in front of the exhibit. Sort of collage-ish, there were GoogleEarth images of a place I didn't recognize, a child in a hoodie running down a street, virtual reality trees piercing through the images as the runner dodged them.  I was viscerally drawn into creating a narrative. I know that feeling--running, to, from, stopping and looking around perplexed as the world changes. Here the borders between virtual and reality were blurred. Oh, new literacies, Web 2.0. I was as lost but curious as I had been Thursday evening in class. I walked away from this exhibit, still not sure how to accept the invitation to interact or  navigate this form.

Chris and I moved on to The Johnny Cash Project. Here I had schema to work from, my appreciation for Mr. Cash as cultural icon, a connection to his music from childhood on. Participants may "draw" or overlay their images atop preselected frames featuring Johnny and the submitted results are blended into a music video for Ain't No Grave. Watching it, listening through headphones, I was convinced there ain't no grave for that man who lives on in this collective consciousness both online and in the brains of all these humans. I attempted to contribute a frame, but lacked the skill to manipulate the controls. Receptive participation rather than expressive once again. But the scalping had begun--after only two exhibits I was beginning to feel the overwhelming sensation that the top of my head was was being taken off. Can it be that I'm only now beginning to see the edges of technology and only just now seriously considering the relationship of flesh and blood people to it?

Next we picked up some 3-D glasses from a docent and experienced After Ghostcatching as yet another layer to this idea of new literacies was added to my schemata. The show begins with an abstracted but undeniably human figure dancing. I read the dance not with my thinking intelligence but with my body, feeling in my muscles how each step would feel, what kind of extension and strength would be required. The figure eventually morphed into something a little less human, more science-fiction-looking, but I took the leap from what I know experentially as an embodied human to continue to read the movement intuitively. These figures, composed of 3D light, blurred into even less recognizable, more ethereal shapes and my reading became further removed from my own experience to mere conjecture. Any further morphing and I'd be completely removed and into the unknown.

These three exhibits alone left me saturated. There were others of note. The political ones, the interactive pandemic horror short, social commentary on how 70's sit-coms have shaped our thinking. Yesterday was the last showing for a few, but most will remain and be added to this week. If you're local, you should check it out. For me, I'm left with plenty of questions, wondering how all this comes together for people, people with bodies and physical brains. How does this change things? How does it change humans? What about evolutionary links with technology? Are our brains changing fundamentally? How about our DNA? What happens if peak oil, global warming catastrophe, random solar flare, wipes out all technological advances? Feeling a bit more comfortable in this milleu, I returned to the first exibit, entered in my hometown and watched the bewildered runner make her way down my familiar rural Main Street. I saw the candystore where I used to buy 25 cent A&W root beer on my way home from school. I composed a postcard to the child I was back then, simply saying, "Hey you."