change to winter again which will fade out. But if you're in the body, you'll see the
 bones slowly come to dust. I went into this work a few weeks ago and I came out not with
 the feeling of longing that I'd had with Osmos, but incredibly joyous because here was art.
 It can't be called by any other name. It's art and it's a joyous art. It's a playful
 art. It's an art that's inviting you into it, not merely to observe, but to participate
 in the being, to participate in Char's vision for what's going on in the world. And I think
 she is the first and she's really an exemplar. And fortunately, she's had the position and
 the opportunity to work in this environment. But everything that she's done will be able
 to do in a Nintendo 64 in two years' time. And with good enough tools, a 12-year-old
 should be able to do it and send it across the internet. And I will be able to stand
 inside of someone else's head. And this interface for all of its vastness really just comes
 out of a desire to be simple and effective and in the body and costs $5. So none of this
 is rocket science. It's always a question of intent. And her intent and integrity as
 an artist was to throw away the Cartesian, to throw away the hard edge, to throw away
 the solid and replace it with a space that allowed you to be inside of it, that respected
 you as an individual inside of a world of her own creating. So you don't feel like you're
 a visitor. You feel like you're part of it. That work, those two works, and T-Vision,
 which we talked about I believe this morning, stand out to me as examples of what I call
 vivogenesis, which is the ability to evoke the positive, the affirming, things that would
 reify the existence of the self, even if that's a multiple self, things that won't cause it
 to be pulled apart willy-nilly, things that allow you to stand in the midst of the flow
 of information and not be overwhelmed by it. And it's certainly my own desire to be able
 to see other works like that happen, to actually work on works like that and hopefully to inspire
 you if you're working to work on works like that, to remember your humanity when you work
 in the virtual, to remember that what you're doing has a profound effect on other people
 because you're really getting into other people's heads. And not only that, they're getting
 into yours. And someone said to me once, "It's a good thing that Char is a profoundly ethical
 person and you can tell from the quality of her work. If she were Leni Riefenstahl, this
 would be a very different world." Do you want to take it for a while?
 [Applause]
 For those of us who couldn't stand to wait for two years for this to come to our neighborhood
 video store, are they available to be seen still at the Gerlach Gallery?
 It's in Ottawa. It's in the National Gallery in Ottawa until September 7th.
 And how about the T-Vision?
 T-Vision is installed at...
 Art+Com?
 It's at Art+Com, but I think it's at...no, the thing in Linz.
 Oh, the Ars Electronica in Linz.
 But if you look for Art+Com on the web, you will find pages that point to it.
 Thank you.
 Does Char have plans to take the camera to the West Coast?
 It's a good question.
 Osmosis has been shown around the world, but it has not been shown on the West Coast.
 It's been shown in New York, in London, in Manchester, in Monterey, Mexico, and I believe
 in Tokyo, but it hasn't come to the West Coast of America.
 Mostly it's because it's an expensive installation, because it does require a silicon graphic
 supercomputer, which has to at least be rented for the duration of the exhibition.
 And also because the technical requirements, most museums are set up to show paintings,
 you know, and that's just the fact of the situation.
 And so the museums have to really build a gallery space for it.
 Now, the gallery space, if it's well constructed, uses a shadow box.
 You can actually see in shadow the human form that's moving.
 So the participant, the immersant, and she's created this word, I think it's actually a
 really nice word, the immersant in this immersive virtual space, is illuminated behind a shadow
 box.
 And in fact, you can see projected on a monitor, or actually projected on a large screen, what
 this person is experiencing.
 And it's nice because you can watch the poetry between the motion of the immersant and the
 visual of what's being created.
 And in fact, I saw very clearly with "Ethemere," which is a much more complex work than "Osmosis,"
 that I saw a number of people going in, and I never saw the same thing twice.
 It was always so rich and so varied and so dynamic, that in fact these environments created,
 I mean, occasionally I was sitting in the room and a gasp would go out from the room
 because someone had stumbled onto a scene in there that was just breathtaking because
 of where it was being viewed and how it was being viewed.
 And it was temporary.
 It was all ephemeral.
 But for that moment, you were opened onto a scene.
 So it takes a lot of work on the part of the museum.
 Most museums are not particularly technically capable.
 The National Gallery was very good, actually.
 But many museums, even modern art museums, aren't capable of really dealing with a supercomputer
 installation and an immersive installation.
 What's the status of virtual reality art on the Internet?
 That's a good question.
 Scott Young.
 Scott Young.
 That's not the nicest virtual reality art on the Internet.
 It's not where I would like it to be.
 My extra grind, I am not blessed with a good visual ability my own self.
 I would love to say that I was a visual artist, but it just ain't going to happen.
 And a lot of people who are visual artists will work for, say, film, filmic media.
 And the difference between, say, working for film and working for a real-time medium such
 as virtual reality is that quite often in real time you have to design images that are
 much more concise, much simpler.
 You can't do Titanic, for example, and expect it to run on your home computer.
 So a lot of the artistic talent has been pulled, in a sense, toward the money and toward the
 recognition, which is in this very high-definition, high-resolution virtual art.
 However, a number of people, and Owen, if you want to throw up any names, too, have
 made real headway.
 An artist that I've worked with from the beginning, he was the first artist to work in VRML and
 did all of my sacred work for me.
 He designed a gallery of sacred objects, an altar and whatnot.
 Has done a lot of work.
 And what he actually ended up doing was almost resorting to Celtic knotwork.
 And some of his works are, in fact, Celtic knotwork.
 But the interesting thing about it is it's Celtic knotwork that's being projected to
 three dimensions.
 So it's got a quality of dynamism as you're viewing it in the fact that the quality of
 the knotwork will change through time.
 So it's got this quality.
 And part of the reason he did that is because flat surfaces, simple flat surfaces, are so
 easy for the computer to display that you can have many of them.
 So you can have these very complicated forms and still not overload someone's computer.
 Because, again, with the Internet, you're dealing with the fact that there's a wide
 range of machines and a wide range of capabilities.
 One of the things, too, about virtual reality technology as it stands right now, really,
 I believe that virtual reality technology is destined to disappear.
 It's illusion, the illusion about it, the trick about it is that it does a disappearing act
 into the corpus of the operating system.
 And that it's going to wind up the kind of windows and widgets and closed boxes and choice
 picking systems that we see in applications now will move into a situation where the entire
 desktop will be a 3D environment.
 If you look at that screen at the front of the monitor as the looking glass interface
 that you go through when you go through to cyberspace, there's this cubic foot behind
 it that you can use.
 And if you have good, simple 3D rendering technology, visual rendering technology, you
 can make use of that space and start to use just a simple mouse to be able to pick things
 out in that 3D environment behind there.
 What kind of bandwidth are people going to have to have for these things to be compelling?
 It's always as much as you can get your hands on.
 That's always the answer for anything that has to do with bandwidth.
 For the most part, most of these are concise enough that they work over with people with
 normal modems.
 Part of the reason being that if it's not something that can transmit concisely over
 the modem, by the time it gets to your computer, it's too unwieldy for your computer to display
 well.
 That brings me to it.
 One of the other more interesting projects, which is sort of at a crossroads between art
 and artificial life, is what's called the BIOTA project.
 And the BIOTA project allows you to use genetic algorithms, AI life, A-life, to actually grow
 plants inside of a virtual environment.
 So you can actually more or less genetically design a plant or an animal with particular
 characteristics, and it will grow on your computer right there according to those particular
 evolutionary characteristics.
 And this is biota.org if anyone is interested, and I can give that to you later as well.
 And these forms, as you play with them, they're not deterministic.
 It's not like you're going to get the same thing every time, because they're subject
 to all sorts of constraints of growth.
 And they actually have established what they call an island, which is running on a computer
 somewhere, where there are all these different forms of A-life running in an environment
 where they're subject to selection pressures and breeding.
 So they're actually creating new forms of life which are not predictive, because these
 forms of life are interacting with each other and interacting with a larger environment.
 And quite often the constructions that arise from that, I think they have insects, I'm
 pretty sure, and they have plants.
 I don't know if they have any sort of higher animals, because those are relatively difficult
 to interpret and model.
 But these forms can actually have an incredible beauty on their own, in part because most
 of them are based on L-systems and fractal mathematics of growth, so that they have this
 intelligibility which allows you to recognize them as being near to the living, but still
 a beauty in their form.
 And aren't there also programs that somehow sense where your attention is in the virtual
 reality and compute outward from the attention point, so the part of the reality you're not
 looking at isn't drawing processor time?
 That's -- yeah, polygon culling and foveal rendering is the other thing which Eric was
 big on, Eric Gellickson was big on.
 Yes, exactly.
 And this has been using the computer technology to sort of trick your perception, because
 really, you know, almost everything out of the center of your perception, your fovea,
 you're not actually seeing it's all memory.
 It's one of those things you learn from perceptual psychology.
 And if it's all memory and, you know, it's a virtual world and you've been there before,
 the computer doesn't need to waste much time on it.
 Now, it's a technique that, although it's well understood, is not often implemented
 in the kind of computer software that you'll see on a personal computer.
 You might see it on a workstation -- on a graphics workstation or a graphics supercomputer.
 I can't give you a good reason for why that is, other than I think programmers are lazy.
 I mean, I think it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 I mean, it's a good thing that we're not using it as a tool.
 Lookit, this is an idea and this is a prototype, but this is not the thing itself.
 And I managed to meet there a very nice young man by the name of Brian Bellendorf,
 who had just started working for this new magazine called Wired on this new online thing that we're doing,
 which would eventually become Wired.com.
 And he said, "Lookit, do you need some help? Why don't you set up a mailing list,
 and we can all talk about this more after the conference?"
 Because the paper generated a lot of interest.
 And I'll give you some of this space.
 You know, the guys from Wired, they like helping up the net.
 They figure if they're going to make money off of it, they might as well help out a bit.
 So we all trek back to San Francisco and we set up this mailing list.
 And I send out some postings to newsgroups on the Internet indicating that this mailing list exists.
 And I figured I'd have about 50 people in two weeks' time,
 and we can settle down and have a nice conversation about what's going on.
 And I wake up the next morning. I did this on Monday.
 And I wake up on Tuesday morning, and there are 750 messages in our mailbox.
 And it kept up like that for two weeks.
 And by the end of two weeks' time, I had 2,500 people from around the world
 who were intensely interested in making this happen.
 And this is when I realized that what we needed to do was to let it all go.
 And I started practicing what in retrospect I now call the stone soup analogy.
 I had the kettle, I threw the stones, and I threw some water, and I said, "Who's got the chicken?"
 Well, it turns out that Silicon Graphics had the chicken, and IBM had some carrots,
 and Sun had some potatoes, and pretty soon we had soup.
 And the nice thing about that, hopefully the object lesson there,
 is that if you leave yourself open for community in that connection,
 you're not trying to hold everything so tight.
 Because the operating theory was that if we did this and it worked,
 well, we'll all make some money on it or something.
 But we don't have to worry about owning things right away,
 because what's important is to get the work done.
 And there was a shared vision.
 Everyone who was involved was involved because they were thinking this was a cool idea,
 and their minds were there, and their hearts were there, and their code followed.
 Just a little while after this, I had a visitor in San Francisco.
 Fred Ronan introduced me to a very interesting gentleman
 whom I've come to be very good friends with by the name of Phil Harrington.
 Phil Harrington was a doctor in Ireland for a number of years,
 but because of a psychedelic experience,
 or I guess probably an empathogenic experience that he had,
 he radically changed the course of his life
 because he was a well-to-do doctor in Dublin, was a millionaire,
 had everything that he wanted, but he was profoundly unhappy.
 And one night, I don't know if it was his first ecstasy experience,
 and I agree with you that ecstasy has this diminishing return,
 but that first time and that second time, my goodness,
 you're going to find your heart center just sort of push right open,
 and if you're ready for it, it's a great thing,
 and if not, then you probably need to take it again.
 [laughter]
 And he has this big, biggest sort of estate house outside of Dublin,
 and he has this extremely intense ecstasy experience,
 and in the midst of this ecstasy experience, he starts to sing,
 and he doesn't even really know why or how he starts to sing,
 but the singing is bringing things up for him.
 The singing is a cleansing for him, and he's bringing up sounds and tones
 from places very deep inside of him, and it doesn't stop.
 Even after the ecstasy wears off, it doesn't stop.
 It's as if what he's connected to, what he's burst through to,
 is some connection to him and maybe something that's larger than him,
 and it's expressing itself in sound.
 It's expressing itself musically.
 Over a period of time, he, in some sense, I guess,
 codified it into something that he calls voce,
 which we'll be doing in just a minute.
 And the idea behind a voce is a set of toning techniques
 which can open you up emotionally.
 They can open you up, ideally, emotionally,
 and they work on focusing tones on the chakras.
 And when it works in a group, and I sincerely hope that it will tonight,
 the effect is really very profound.
 It's a beautiful sort of connected feeling with the other people in the environment.
 When I'd encountered this idea, it rolled through my head for a month or two,
 and I said, "Wouldn't it be interesting, since we've collapsed space,
 we've eliminated space, right?
 Speed is now light. You can be anywhere you want.
 Let's take this event that happens mostly locally, as it will happen tonight,
 and broaden it."
 And at this point, I had a flash.
 I don't remember now, in retrospect, whether it was psychedelically inspired or not,
 but I remember I saw that same world that I'd seen years before,
 but now it was singing, and I could hear it.
 And the singing that it was making was the sound of the people
 who were sharing this experience, unmediated by proximity.
 And I think that when we're in a search for forms that can reinforce the self,
 even as we encounter technology, this could be one of them.
 And so I immediately dreamed up a name.
 I decided it was World Song, because that was literally what it was representing,
 and Paul and I set to work on it.
 The technologies we've tried so far have not been up to the task,
 because we haven't had the tens of millions of dollars that it would take
 to create something that I think Paul and I would be satisfied with.
 But as experiments in the direction, I think everyone involved
 has been very pleased with the results.
 And the idea is that if we can have a kind of connectivity
 that's not just of the mind, but at the heart, on a local level,
 why not try to extend that franchise to something that's more on a global level?
 You want to take it away, Paul?
 Sure. I think James is going to help me.
 This is Paul Godwin, a friend, confidant, etc.
 I've asked James to do...
 Those of you that were at yoga this morning, James is a Kundalini yoga teacher,
 so he's going to help us to stretch out a little before we do any vocal work.
 So, James, I'm going to ask you to come up to the stage when you can see me.
 Hi.
 Paul, have a nice evening.
 I'll introduce you to something called yoga rubrics.
 Oh, God.
 What's this yoga practice?
 [Indistinct chatter]
 Okay, so, back feet on the floor.
 And inhale and stretch up.
 And raise your fingers.
 And exhale and touch the floor.
 And while you're down here, let's hit it about eight times like this.
 And everything is done to a count of eight.
 Flap your arms eight times.
 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
 And let's see if you've got enough room.
 Run in place to the count of eight.
 And then bring your hands up and inhale to the right, to the left, to the right.
 Four, five, six, seven, eight.
 To the other side.
 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
 And again, run in place.
 And let's come and hit the ground again, eight times.
 And run in place.
 And let's take one more deep breath and inhale and stretch up.
 And exhale and stretch.
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 Great.
 I think that a circle actually would be the best shaped toy for this.
 Yeah, we will be sitting, or if you prefer, you can stand behind the dude sitting.
 But pillows are fine.
 They're actually great.
 A little bit of a pillow on your back.
 You've got a big voice.
 You sit next to me.
 Okay, I'll go to you first.
 All right, I'm having big mumps right now.
 Let's see.
 Wow.
 We can do more than one circle actually.
 You know, we can try to do more like pillows.
 Get them closer together.
 That would probably be better.
 So, yeah, yeah, concentric is fine.
 I think a group would be better than a huge perimeter.
 Yeah, that seems fine.
 Wow.
 We're back in semicircles.
 [ Indistinct conversations ]
 So Mark talked about Ronan bringing Phil around.
 I wouldn't mind for a second if Ronan was in the room.
 I've never actually heard how you encountered Phil, though.
 I heard it might have been like a moon vibration or something, you guys.
 So I guess Phil actually is now a singer/songwriter,
 but he at this time, like Mark said, was a physician, very unhappy and unsuccessful.
 And Phil used voce as a -- what he developed into voce became like a program for singing for non-singers,
 people who kind of thought they might want to sing
 or had never really had any musical training or background but wanted to.
 And it begins -- a regular voce session will begin with something like a counting,
 maybe spontaneous counting, one to 20 and back down again,
 meaning so a group like us would count to 20.
 If you felt the impulse, you'd say one, and then he'd say two and so forth.
 So slight attunement, and then he moves on to a chakra toning.
 And then it generally moves on into a verbal, that is with words,
 a kind of a call and response type of work.
 My interest in it really -- I guess the first toning work I probably did was at some rainbow gatherings or something like 1980 or so.
 Seeing 5,000 people just going home on the 4th of July generating huge circular rainbows was dandy.
 30,000, she went this year, 30,000.
 But I have been interested in the voce work,
 and mostly the voce work that we've continued to do has been related to the chakras.
 And so what we're going to do tonight is based on the structure of the chakra system,
 and we will do seven tones, and each one can last from three or so to five breaths generally.
 I don't have a huge source of wind, so it takes me 15 of those.
 But whenever I'm with some big blowers, and I say, "Oh, let's do 10 this time."
 They're like, "10? 10 would take an hour."
 So anyway, that's what we'll do.
 I will do a short little bit of guided meditation that will just kind of ground us in each chakra,
 and then I'll tell you the sound, and then we'll make that sound.
 Now, if you're all game, which I hope some of you are, maybe a high percentage are game,
 we'll go ahead and try something a little different tonight,
 which I think we talked about would be really cool, which would be that--
 I think Mark as well, and Rona, we all talked about that we weren't really--
 we're not quite into the word-oriented improv of it, but we like the idea of improv of it.
 And so what I'd like to try tonight is that when we do a tone,
 I'd encourage you or welcome you to improvise on the tone just sonically.
 So you can sort of play with the sound, play with the melody,
 or play with the rhythm a little bit if you want.
 And I mean, if you really feel like you have to yell out a word, yell it.
 [laughter]
 But the thing about that, this exercise, will be that we're really going to be making music here together.
 And so the key to making music is listening, and that means listening to yourself
 and making the sound that you really want to make.
 And if you don't feel like making a sound, don't make one,
 and otherwise be listening to other people,
 and if you hear something that inspires you, then go ahead along with it.
 Likewise, as in good improvisation, like jazz or any kind of good improvisation,
 we will let the improv take the course that it wants to take,
 and that will involve listening as well.
 So we will do a chakra, and if it's going well, we'll just keep doing it,
 and try to listen, and think of it as a piece of music that you bought on a CD,
 and when do you want it to fade out?
 And when you want it to fade out, you'll be participating in a fade.
 Okay, with less verbiage, maybe we can just close our eyes.
 I didn't get in a comfortable position.
 I also want to say that the tone that you sing is not, the actual tone, the note on the scale,
 is not important that you sing the note that I sing, or that your neighbor sings.
 The important thing is that the note that you choose resonates in your body cavity,
 and this is a great wake-up.
 It's really good for pre-yoga or after yoga.
 I roll out of bed and do a voce, because the sound actually can wake up parts of your body,
 and that's what you're tuning for when you choose.
 So when you look for a tone, I might start a tone and say, "Ahh," and you might go, "Ahh,"
 and you won't really feel it in that chakra, but then move around, kind of go, "Ahh, oh, ahh,"
 and then you'll be, "Ahh, oh, I feel it in that chakra."
 So that's the one you should choose.
 So again, we'll close our eyes.
 Take a deep breath in.
 Exhale.
 Another one.
 And I want you to imagine that we are sitting on top of a huge ball in space,
 and we are rotating really quickly.
 And at the center of this ball is a fiery orb.
 So I want you to concentrate on that fiery orb that is many, many miles below you.
 It's incredibly--it has a very, very dense mass, and we're going to imagine that our root at the base of--
 really at the tween where you're sitting is connected to that fiery orb.
 And I want you to imagine a deep red color, like a really dark red, like it's almost black.
 And there are veins of energy between the center of the earth and your root.
 And the sound that we're going to use is "Ahh."
 And we're just going to do some "Ahh."
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 We are grounded. The energy moves upward, and the color becomes a very warm and glowing orange,
 and the energy is swirling around your navel.
 And this chakra is where we will digest all that grounded energy from the earth,
 and we will use it to nourish ourselves and each other.
 And as it swirls, it will massage the inner organs, and it will allow us to digest,
 and there we will take in information and food and toxins,
 and we will just move them through our system and take what nourishment we need and expel the rest.
 And that rosy orange color will generate a sound which is "Ohhhh."
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 [rumbling]
 The energy rises up to your solar plexus,
 and it begins to connect with a waterfall, like a white waterfall cord that's coming down the back of your spine,
 and that's really reaching all the way up into the cosmos.
 And in the center of your solar plexus is a yellow, like a white, almost a yellow-white, like an eggshell.
 And this is the area which we use for our direction, and it's the cord which we follow.
 And when we're centered, it feels like a spindle around which our entire being can just spin and rotate,
 and it's your direction home.
 I've been doing Boche skiing lately, and it's great. This shocker is terrific for skiing.
 It just lines you up with the direction, and you can tone them down.
 So the sound here is a really kind of pre-verbal, pre-guttural "Ehh" sound.
 And it's not a "Sum" as the ones we've been doing.
 And here you can spit out other phrases in a way, like kind of a venomous way,
 or if you want more direction, or if you're trying to protect your zone.
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 [sounds of the wind]
 gets honey after that. The energy moves up to everyone's favorite chakra, the heart.
 The heart is the heart chakra. The heart chakra is the heart chakra, the heart chakra is the
 heart chakra. The heart chakra is the heart chakra. The heart chakra is the heart chakra.
 The heart chakra is the heart chakra. The heart chakra is the heart chakra. The heart
 chakra is the heart chakra. The heart chakra is the heart chakra. The heart chakra is
 the heart chakra.
 At the level of the throat is a glue. It can be any glue. It can be any glue. It can be
 any glue. I always like the phrase "deep cerulean glue." There can be a sky glue. And this is
 the place where we say the things that we mean and we don't say the things that we mean.
 And this is the place where we sing from and cry from. So it's a really great spot to open
 up and the sound is really easy. And we sing it, it's like we sing everything we always
 wanted to say and when we cried when we were kids because we didn't have words, we were
 still trying to sing the same note.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]
 Well, this is, we're turning final here as old bush pilots say. That means you're committed
 to land shortly. So this is our last session. It runs slightly abbreviated because the Esalen
 machine likes you to go back to your room and have everything out for the next crew
 of aspirants by noon. So we'll land shortly after 1130 or at 1130. And the intent is that
 you clear your room and then you're welcome to come back and have lunch and drift to your
 separate homes. So this session is a wrap up session. Mark has some things he wants
 to say. This is your last chance to get a crack at us in this context. If you, if there's
 something that's been burning as an issue for you that didn't get dealt with, it's your
 obligation to get it out for us. Mark, why don't you work with it.
 Okay. I just have some basic housekeeping notes. First off, this weekend has been renamed
 letting go and moving on. And I'm taking an informal unscientific survey to find out whether
 the event at the end of time used to be called the Yes Catan or the Esketit. And I just like
 to note for those of you who heard my rap yesterday about planning on doing something
 and then getting up the next morning and not doing it at all. Then, in fact, I wasn't talking
 about Saturday morning, but I was talking about Sunday morning.
 Did yoga not happen? Yes, it did. No, yoga did happen. All five
 of us. The few, the few and the proud and the enormously
 relaxed. This morning I have de-bogged myself for you. I am not wearing my nicotine patch
 and I popped my contact lenses out and I have my funky little Japanese eyeglasses on. In
 part because this is the part that I want to be the most authentic. And what you're
 seeing now and for the rest of the morning hopefully will be the real me as close as
 I know what the real me is. So I've taken off all of the masks except for the dye in
 my hair and that's a bit more complicated. We've been tracing out a line. I've sort of
 been talking about my work over a period of time and we'd run along and now we're coming
 to early 1996. And in early 1996 the web has taken off and Vromo is starting to take off.
 And I'm now faced with the question, I'm not an artist and I don't even play one in VR.
 I have a vision. I'm an engineer. I can write code and make certain things happen. But now
 I've participated in this stone soup that gave the world VRML and I'm faced with what
 do I do with it? And what happened, what I was driven to was this original vision that
 I had about the body of a planet floating in cyberspace. And it happened really sort
 of slowly. Pieces started sort of filtering in. I started to see that that was here and
 that was here and that was here. And one of the things that we almost don't notice about
 the web is that the web allows you not only to find out things but it allows you to pull
 things and pull them together in a very broad way. You can take specific pieces and use
 them in your own work. So that it's not just this storehouse of knowledge but it's now
 this combinatorial matrix that new forms can emerge out of. And all of a sudden I discovered
 John Walker's website. John Walker is the founder of Autodesk and from what I've heard
 a terrifyingly bright man. And John Walker has a thing about space and he has a thing
 about satellites. And in particular he has a thing about meteorological satellites. And
 he's a mathematician and a programmer and so what he can do is he can take all the nice
 lovely images that all the nice lovely weather satellites are taking of the earth all the
 time. And if you've seen a weather satellite, well it's the earth. It's this nice spherical
 image of the earth from the position of the view of this weather satellite. Which is fine
 and dandy if you just want to look at a picture. But because he's a wily mathematician he can
 actually take that picture and then stretch it out for you so it looks like a flat surface.
 It's as if you're taking the globe or a section of the globe and laying it out. When I saw
 that that was available the final light bulb went off and I set to work. Because these
 satellite images are updated hourly. They come in to NASA or NOAA into their computers.
 They shoot up to computers in Minnesota. They get more processed and then they shoot over
 to computers in Switzerland and get even more processed. And once they're over in those
 computers in Switzerland then I was able to do something with them. And what I did was
 I took this literal real time photograph of the earth's surface and broke it up into a
 mosaic of tiles and laid these tiles across the globe. So what you get as a result in
 3D is what I called when I was done with it Web Earth. And what it is is it's as if you're
 above the earth floating above the earth looking down on it. And it doesn't take a super computer
 and it doesn't take a T1 connection because I didn't have either of those things when
 I was working. What it takes is any sort of PC any sort of net connection and a willingness
 to click to the URL that I've written far too small up there. But you can copy it down
 and the idea behind that was that I'd seen works like T Vision which are big high end
 sort of production enterprises operas as it were and all I just wanted to do was write
 a rock and roll song with a catchy tune. Something like that.
 And. And I spent really only about a week working on this. It was really just a matter
 of working at integrating the data and testing it and getting it all up. And when it was
 up and I had this 3D model of the planet which updates itself every hour so you can see the
 weather systems as they move across the body of the planet. When it was up after these
 five days of work I actually broke down crying in front of the monitor because at the end
 I'd come back to where I'd started or at least I'd started to come back to where I'd
 started because it's not an end point. It's a beginning point but somehow I'd managed
 to take this psychedelic revelation and through a lot of magic and a lot of time and a lot
 of will and a part of a lot of people produced this object and this object is my offering
 to the web. It's my offering to you. It's not meant to be an end point but it's meant
 to be a beginning. It's being capable of saying look at us. This is where we are right
 now. This is what's going on. Let's take a look. Let's play with scale. Let's play with
 time. Let's play with all the different ways of taking a look at all the ways we interconnect
 so we can understand that so that we can work the planet better. So we can become this seamless
 informational entity that understands itself and its own processes so well that it corrects
 the errors in these processes very quickly and improves the flow for those processes
 for all the processes that are involved. It's silly and probably egotistical to cry at your
 own work. What I didn't expect was that when other people saw it they would cry. And that's
 when I suspected I'd come to the authentic because it's simple. It's not much code. It
 was a little thought and it was the pooling of resources. But what it evokes in people,
 what I've seen it evoke in people, appears to be an authentic reaction of recognition.
 We've talked in here about what happens to the astronauts when they get to space and
 they behold the body of the planet. And there's an old joke that there was some sort of space
 expo perhaps in France in the 1960s and there was some sort of Gemini capsule and they managed
 to talk a cosmonaut and an American astronaut in it. And they got in it and they closed
 the doors and it sealed off. And the cosmonaut turns to the astronaut and says, "So did you
 see God up there too?" And it's the authentic question because there's something about the
 information of perceiving the body of the planet as a whole that is radically transformative.
 And for the moment we can't all shoot ourselves into orbit for that point of view. But what
 I found at least in a gentle echo is that works like Web Earth have the capability of
 producing the same in us. And I think that it's a question of intent. There's no reason
 that there aren't a hundred thousand other things like this. All of the source code for
 this I've made freely available because basically I want other people to take it and run with
 it and add to it and whatever, add their own databases. I'm starting to now look at what
 they call brownfields. Brownfields are these toxic zones that aren't toxic enough to be
 classified as super fun sites but are still toxic. And with one of my friends that I've
 known for 20 years and we're thinking of maybe starting to add these in there and census
 data and so on and so forth. And maybe if we work hard at this we can get a stone soup
 going around that. But it doesn't have to happen all at one place. It's the web. It
 can happen anywhere and a bunch of different people can turn up a bunch of different things
 all the time. If where they're working from is their heart. And that's my own humble offering
 in that domain. It's certainly not everything that it could be. You can't zoom in and see
 yourself standing on the street corner, though I'm sure that's not far away. You can't click
 on your own house. You can't knock on someone's door electronically by coming down to spy
 on them. You can't see birds in flight or populations in migration yet. All you can
 see is the clouds floating by on a blue sphere.
 But if everybody who had global data poured it into this kind of filing system is what
 it is, then you could have flow of petroleum, electrical grids, positions of ships at sea,
 where everyone with a Brazilian passport was at any given moment. So it's like reconstructing
 it. It's some kind of alchemical data reconstruction of the real world on every level, ultimately,
 that were carried out.
 There's five billion stories on a naked planet.
 Well, you know, Joyce, when he wrote Finnegan's Wake, in some interview he gave at the time,
 he said that his goal was to write a book so complexified that if the universe were
 to be destroyed, you could reconstruct it in all its detail from the book.
 Do you think that that's the analog of this?
 A perfect understanding would mean you could create a perfect simulacrum of something.
 I mean, that's what I think understanding is. So if you had a perfect understanding
 of the atmosphere, the geology, the biology, the sociology of the planet, you ought to
 be able to recreate it.
 Do you think, and Mark, in all this too, that we're being compelled or this thing is compelling
 itself to be visualized like that for some other reason? Something else is compelling
 it to create the simulacrum?
 It's very, well, the image itself is very seductive and that's telling us something.
 The seductiveness of the image means that it has a propensity to reproduce.
 The other question is, given a perfect simulacrum, what is the difference between it and what
 is simulacrum?
 Well, it converges on it. It's never perfect. It converges on it.
 And then the perspective of the beholder. You know, this discussion reminds me of the
 passage in the I Ching. I think it's the commentary on the hexagram before completion,
 where it says, "If the sacrifice is correctly carried out, you may hold the universe in
 the palm of your hand like a spinning marble." So it's like, it is an alchemical goal.
 It's the philosopher's stone, because the philosopher's stone is all and everything
 immediately apprehended and beheld. And this is what this would result in.
 It's funny, to show you how different Mark and I must be at some fundamental level, for
 years I've had this idea in the back of my mind for my fantasy interface for the World
 Wide Web, what would it look like? And I've also had a rap, which you were spared this
 weekend, which is all about how what we need to do at the end of history is turn ourselves
 inside out. That somehow we needed to bring the soul into visible manifestation, and the
 body would become a freely commandable object in the imagination. You know, it would have
 super strength. It could fly. It could swim underwater.
 Well, in this process of exploring this metaphor, turn inside out, I came upon the image in
 a psychedelic trip of an interface to the World Wide Web, where when you came online,
 you would burst into a space, and it's Mark's object, but turned inside out and with the
 point of view at the center of it. So as you turn 360 degrees, you would see Africa, Asia,
 Australia, and everything would be lit up with colored pipelines of light that would
 designate the various websites, and then you would just spin in this global dimension and
 then point and rush in and into the connections. So obviously, at the end of our, you know,
 at the end of our philosophical umbilical cord is this weird image of the total planet
 as a living, integrated, and it's more than an image. As Mark pointed out, it's not simply
 how it appears in ordinary light to human vision. It's the data image. It all must be
 there, you know, the geology, the economics, the religious warfare, the history, everything
 brought to a point. When we've talked about the eschaton here and at other times, what
 it is is it's a bringing of everything together. You know, there have been lots of haggles
 ever since the 1940s about defining information. In fact, Gregory Bateson in this very room
 offered one of the best definitions of information. He said, "Information is any difference that
 makes a difference." But the way I think of information and complexification is it has
 to do with density of connectivity. And so my image of the end state of the attractor
 is, in mathematical terms, it's a space in which all points are cotangent. The first
 philosopher in the West to stumble onto the necessity of this concept was Leibniz, and
 he had this idea of what he called the monad. Leibniz was accused of inventing the smallest
 form of God because his monads were perfect hologrammatic fractal reflections of the entire
 cosmos. But he said the only way one monad differs from another or can possibly differ
 from another is by its perspective on the other monads given its position in the matrix
 in which it occurs. So this convergence thing is all information, all data is becoming cotangent.
 This can't happen in matter. Matter has exclusionary principles where it says if there's an electron
 here, there can't be another electron precisely here, only one electron per electron space.
 But in some kind of data space, all this stuff can be funneled together. And that's really
 what human history is, is it's all being rolled up into a ball and then the ball is being
 recompacted. It's a kind of reverse enactment of what happened to matter at the Big Bang,
 but it's happening to information here at the end of the story. Just a thought, you
 know. On a different tangent, I have one last magical act this weekend. It's an exorcism.
 You all have to help me let go and move on from my recent trip to the magic kingdom.
 I'll put this on and I want you to take a good look at it because it is an object so
 fantastic, so unspeakable that I simply had to own it. Yes, they sell this at Walt Disney
 Walt. It should be on the flag. It's like your first look at a swastika. And when I
 saw it, the sick thing was I knew I had to have it because no one would believe me. How
 much was it? Sixteen bucks. I need to leave it on while I conduct this exorcism and I
 will need your help. So this is an audience participation part of the program.
 I went to SIGGRAPH this year, which was held in Orlando this year as it was in '94. And
 I arranged my schedule very carefully so that on Monday when things generally don't happen
 at SIGGRAPH, I could take one of my best friends to the magic kingdom for his birthday. And
 we got up bright and early and we rode into the gates of Disney World and traveled through
 the park to the happiest place on earth. And because I knew I was going to need some level
 of chemical irony, we ate mushrooms. Just enough. Because I knew I was going to need,
 I suppose you could think of it as an insulator layer between the reality of Mickey and the
 reality of the cosmos. And the mushrooms start to hit. We go on a scary ride and it's fun,
 but then we come out and we're in Tomorrowland and I see the object. And I didn't even know
 ahead of time that this is where I had to go. And I didn't know till afterward that
 I had to go there. And I entered the Carousel of Progress.
 The Carousel of Progress was created for the 1964 World's Fair in New York. It was,
 as John Cameron Swayze narrates at the beginning, Walt's favorite ride. It really summed up
 everything that he thought about the world. And the ride is very interesting because you
 sit in chairs, you're an audience, there's a proscenium and you move around the proscenium.
 And every time that you rotate through the proscenium, there's a song which we'll
 come to in a moment. But the first time you rotate, you're facing a scene and it's
 America at the turn of the century, probably right before Principia Mathematica and the
 ultraviolet catastrophe solution. And America is mostly rural according to the scene. And
 it's Valentine's Day and this gentleman in a chair is telling us about how great it is
 at the turn of the century. It's animatronic, of course. And he's telling us about all
 the great innovations and he's heard about this thing called the telephone and they're
 going to be getting electric power in here before too long and blah, blah, blah, blah,
 blah. And now we're about to move and there's a song. And the song goes like this. "Now
 is the time, now is the best time, now is the best time of your life." And the state
 moves and we're in the 1920s. And in the 1920s, there's now an electrical outlet with
 more plugs in it than I've ever seen. And there's a fan going because it's now we've
 gone to the 4th of July in this 1920-ish era and there's a radio in the background. And
 once again, this gentleman is talking about how great everything is and how all the new
 innovations are absolutely wonderful and how good it is. It's all good. And once again,
 we move to the next scene and we get the song. "Now is the time, now is the best time,
 now is the best time of your life." And all of a sudden, we're in a kitchen circa 1946,
 which because Swing is very hip right now, I actually want to move into. It's the vinyl
 and the curved couches. I'm like, "Wow, that's actually really, really hip." And there are
 kitchens in LA like this. So I like it. I'm already at home. And we now have achieved
 the era of the dishwasher and the really nice refrigerator and all of these things that
 are just talking about how wonderful it is. And that gentleman is sitting in the chair
 and he's telling us how wonderful it is. And now, well, after that era is over and it's
 Halloween, by the way, we now go to the last part. All together now. "Now is the time,
 now is the best time, now is the best time of your life." Now, of course, this ride was
 constructed in 1964. And so these were designed to be 20-year intervals. But Disney's Imagineers
 have been hard at work. So all of a sudden, we go from 1946 to Christmas Day in 1998.
 Wham! And it's a suburban living room and it's night and the family are playing with
 their Christmas gifts. And it turns out that Junior's gotten a fully immersive VR system
 for Christmas. And he's got a data glove and it's showing up on the TV screen so the whole
 family can sit around and watch. And then Grandma gets in there and whoops his ass at
 the Space War game. This was my moment of ontological discontinuity around this. In
 some ways, I am compelled to feel responsible for what gets done with VR. Not because I
 invented it or created it, but in part because I've been trying to use my own voice and my
 own heart to help direct some of where it's going. And I sat in a theater, in a theme
 park, in a state that had practically burnt to the ground two weeks before, because the
 climate is not quite right. Next to a state where it hasn't rained, and I don't think
 it still has rained in three months. Coming from a state that practically melted into
 the ocean, because something's wrong. Because things are not balancing anymore. Because
 all of a sudden we go from 1946 to 1998 and nothing is making any sense. But in fact what's
 being held before us is a virtual reality that's not allowing us to articulate the real,
 but is being used as the mechanism to flee from it. And that was the moment I got ill.
 Because entertainment is fine, there's no issue there, but the thought that in fact
 the future that awaits us is not grounded in any way in what we are, in the real or
 in the planet, that to me is horrifying. And this part of the morning's talk is really
 called a new story. Because we have to be able to, in some sense, take a look at those
 stories when they pop up. And we can say, well yeah, now is the time, now is the best
 time, but is that the story that I'm buying? What am I being sold on that tab of reality?
 What's going on here? Do I want to be using it to flee? Is it because of the processes
 that have been set up by capital and market formation and consensus and advertising that
 this is just the logical product? Do I have to buy into this? And of course, the hidden
 ethic of Disney, as a corporation, as a media giant, is that you absorb the media on all
 different levels of intensity and of course you come to the theme park when you want the
 intensified experience of information. It's really an amplification of what you'll get
 on ABC, or on the Disney Channel, or in the movies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And
 what they're doing is they're selling me a reality. And I decided at that moment, at
 this profound ontological level, that I wasn't buying it. And I think once we say that, there's
 a space that opens up. And the space that opens up is the space for the new stories
 and what we do and how we work and how we talk to each other and how we love and how
 we connect and how we create is in that space of new stories. And those new stories are
 the old stories because the present is an archaic revival. But those stories are new
 stories because we have this endless engine of creativity of art that we can plumb, that
 we can move into, to tell us the stories about what's really going on. Tell us the stories
 about history ending and make that comforting. Make the eschaton a yes-gaton. Get us comfortable
 with that. Get us comfortable with all the changes that are being invoked by the engines
 of time.
 >> How do you mean?
 >> I mean, you can say that, but sort of all the forces that are in play, just, I mean,
 can I do that?
 >> Yeah, go.
 >> I think we're incredibly impatient. I mean, for example, you know, my entire adult life
 was lived under the shadow of something called the Cold War, which was supposed to eventually
 end in the end of the world. And the religious and social structures that were in place supported
 this conclusion. Now the Soviet Union doesn't exist, hasn't for nearly a decade, and there's
 been a tremendous build-down in nuclear weaponry. It isn't that we've come to paradise, but
 we have certainly, some of the problems that were thought intractable and insoluble have
 in fact yielded and become part of the historical record. The fact that we could collectively,
 as a global society, back away from a race war in South Africa is remarkable. So I think,
 you know, that very complicated forces are in play at the moment. It's silly to talk
 about whether the forward movement of history is good or bad. It simply is. But I think,
 you know, the nation state is on the ropes in the way the church was on the ropes in
 the early 17th century at the time of the Thirty Years' War, and that the new corporate
 dispensation is different. War is not seen as an instrument of corporate policy. Racism
 interferes with expanding niche markets. Unregulated markets are a pain in the ass to corporatism.
 So I think the world is restructuring. We haven't yet hit the real test. In other words,
 technological change, as we've discussed it here, is going to become ever more accelerated.
 Whether social and political systems can accommodate remains to be seen, but so far there hasn't
 been a cracking apart yet. One of the counter arguments I might offer to the question that
 you very reasonably pose, in the present time, things are very non-linear. Things change
 very quickly. The web changed everything about everything, and that was not a project of
 capital. All right? So projects that have nothing to do with markets or anti-markets
 or capital or the distribution of anything on this planet that we would normally associate
 as a power structure have had profound non-linear influences on our day-to-day lives. And this
 is only increasing. The system's only getting more unstable. It's not approaching some sort
 of equilibrium. It's actually getting more unstable. And so it's always an argument about
 sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When I suggest making a new story, and I don't
 mean making one new story or just one myth, because that's just as hegemonic as the myth
 of history, right? It's 10 or 10,000 and send them out into the world. What I'm arguing
 for, and I want to be very clear on this, is that Disney is magic and you fight magic
 with magic. You spin the new words, you spin the stories, you get them out there. You get
 them eating away at the mouse or everything that it can do until you get to a myth that
 you feel satisfied living with, a myth that you think is actually the truth, that is comfortable,
 even entertaining. Because clearly there's room for entertainment there, but you don't
 want an entertainment that's based fundamentally on blindness and closure. You want an entertainment
 that's based fundamentally maybe on authenticness. All of the old stories, all of the old myths
 are authentic. Their manner of transmission is by the fact that they are authentic. They
 couldn't be carried any other way. The vessel cannot hold them unless they're authentic.
 So when you try to create a culture that's bounded on inauthentic myths, the vessel in
 fact in which it's carried dissolves.
 Yeah, I see all this going forward under the notion of the, almost the obligation now to
 create art, that the expansion of human capacity means we're slipping away from the influence
 of these centrally disseminated artistic canons, Western civilization, Christianity, capitalism,
 and so forth and so on. And the only way to survive in the media environment is to produce
 it, not consume it. The people who consume it become the spectators to other people's
 unfoldment. So that's why the new tools for communication are not for graphic designers
 or special effects people. They're for everybody. Because if you're not producing a vision,
 you are consuming somebody else's vision. And there doesn't seem to me to be much middle
 ground. What do you say?
 I have one. On that sort of note, having worked in the interactive field for the last four
 years, there were lots of companies and lots of attention paid to trying to either build
 the tools, present the tools, or offer alternatives that were interactive entertainment, that
 were essentially consumer-oriented product, or things that would allow people to be creative.
 And all those issues are being grappled with all the time as anyone making content. But
 part of those concerns are like, does Joe Sixpack really want to make anything? I mean,
 aren't there, don't you think there are real consumers who just really, that's what they
 want to do?
 Of course there's a room for the seamy side. But on the other hand, the idea that the great
 unwashed masses are somehow dull is a print-created elitist notion that is absolutely untrue.
 And not holding up in the face of the web.
 Not holding up in the face of the web. My career is proof that you can use big words
 and talk to ordinary people and be perfectly understood. So I think no, it's this myth
 of monotypic markets and dumbing everything down is at the convenience of the producer,
 not the consumer. You know, if you, well I recently read Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason
 and Dixon, which pictures America in the 1760s right before the revolution. The level of
 erudition evidenced by ordinary common people, you know, it was the height of a literary
 society to have read the Greeks and the Roman orators and all that was not uncommon. In
 fact, it was typical. One of the prices we've paid for mass communication is the tabloidization
 of everything from the Encyclopedia Britannica on down. So no, I think that given the right
 social environment, the richness of ordinary human beings is what was sacrificed on the
 altar of print-created civilization. We were made interchangeable parts in an industrial
 engine which valued similitude, you know, the concept of the citizen.
 When you raise similitude, I mean, that's a real issue because likewise, people working
 in VR and VRML, you know, they don't start from ground zero. They're coming, many, from
 architecture, from traditional design. The web is extremely print-driven and oriented.
 In fact, Mark is really one of the few, you know, visionaries in the web who's purporting,
 you know, look elsewhere for your models. Don't, you know, follow the existing, you
 know, the old, the new, the old. But we're all pioneers here. In other words, the bandwidth
 isn't there yet. The really simple tools aren't there yet. The public doesn't know, even the
 net-using public. And if I can, Paul, I think that the seduction
 of creation is there, but not at the level that it will be. And it's going to be something
 very non-linear. It's going to be just like the web. What's going on, right? Just like
 the Mac when you saw it. You know, it's going to be something that's very like that. And
 the fact that we haven't got there, I mean, we're playing in this space or we're sort
 of probing the space and eventually... Patience, you're saying?
 I don't know if it's patience. Play, play. There will be virtual realities attached to
 you, Dora, as documents. This probably can be done now.
 It can. Who has the disk size and bandwidth to handle
 it? But if big machines are talking to each other, it's happening now. And the trickle-down
 thing is very, very rapid. When printing was invented, there was a 50-year
 period called the incunabulary period where all the things that were printed on the new
 printing press were intended and conceived to resemble manuscripts that had been made
 for hundreds, thousands of years. They didn't have another contact. After the first 50 years,
 print found its own voice, as it were, and many, many things happened. And this is widely
 recognized as the incunabulary period of electronic or digital or whatever you want to call it,
 discourse and texts. So be patient and be afraid.
 Wait at least six more months.
 [laughter]
 New young people that are using the web want to be creative. They're looking for that.
 They know they can and they understand how and they go and they do it.
 I think a lot of generalities are being made here because I've worked behind the counter.
 We did a lot of customer service and I really don't think that the masses... I've worked
 in video stores, I've worked in delis, I've worked any place that they consume and again
 I don't make generalities, but people didn't really care about anything innovative coming
 in. They wanted the next action film. They didn't want to think. They wanted to vegetate
 after a hard day at work.
 They want to be seduced by the hypnosis of media.
 The hypnosis of television.
 Well, it's not...
 No, but that's one thing that we're dealing with is that the mass medium that's dominant
 in our culture right now is television. And it's a very hypnotic...
 But the market studies show that what people are deserting in favor of the web when they
 reallocate their expendable time is TV. I mean, in other words, they're still having
 as much sex, they're still walking their dogs as much, they're still hiking in the wilderness
 as much, but they're slashing their television viewing.
 Right.
 This is the most... This is the best news out of Gamora in a while.
 Is there Gamora.com that you subscribe to?
 I own it.
 You know, one of the things that strikes me is the value that we've seen from the internet
 worldwide well...


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