The Virtual and Physical Hidden in Plain Sight

When I was a child we used to play a simple game in a friend’s expansive, shadowy basement.  Each of us would take turns hiding something in plain sight.  Some of us had a gift for it, some didn’t.  It was spooky, dramatic and great fun.  I remember the thrill of hunting through shelves and trunks and oddly stacked furniture.

The frisson that Lynn and I experienced when we first came across the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, which crosses beneath the Thames, was similar.  The long tunnel has its own dreary, Victorian beauty and almost abstract geometry, of course.  But it’s equally fun that in a sense it’s hidden in plain sight.  It remains a commonly used footpath for crossing the river and the entrances on either side aren’t that interesting.

A different example is in Chaco Canyon.  If you don’t know much about the area or even if you do and it’s your first time, you’re naturally drawn to the monumental great houses built by the Chacoans a thousand years ago.  It’s entirely possible to pass by the immense butte in the center of the canyon thinking it’s interesting, dramatic geography but no more.  In fact Fajada Butte is as worthy of attention as the more ostensible remnants of Chacoan construction.  The remains of a 95-meter-high, 230-meter-long ramp is hidden in plain sight on the southwestern face.  And, if you have an eye for detail, you can see remnants of construction near the top.  In fact it’s a diverse archaeological site; evidence suggests it may have been used for religious and ceremonial purposes as well as astronomical and solar observation.  So Mayan pyramids immediately come to mind:  did the Chacoans use a natural feature instead of a constructed one for the same purpose?  What relationship, if any, did Mayan culture have to Chacoan culture which came shortly after?  And it’s in plain sight.

Here’s something new in plain sight.  Twenty-five years ago I read a Computer Science paper of which I can find no record.  I believe the authors were David C. Evans and Micky Mantle and the title was something like “Once More Around the Wheel of Reincarnation.”  The point of the article was that as digital technology and research advance, old architectures are reinvented and applied to meet the exigencies and opportunities implicit in new elements.  Their particular example was the computer workstation (which was then in the ascendant) and the mainframe computer.  Since then the architectural balance between those elements and the elements themselves have been “reincarnated” many times.  Today we have tablet computers and multiple clouds.

Another technological idea which recurs and is reapplied is that idea of creating a single and/or preeminent portal for accessing entertainment, or purchasing hard goods or even consolidating scientific and technological research.  Amazon clearly demonstrates how successful that strategy can be while Spotify and even Youtube are more ambiguous in spite of their ubiquity.

In that context, I find Shakespeare’s Globe’s recent decision to stream their productions of Shakespeare’s plays very provocative.  The key question is why aren’t they doing it through one of the much larger portals?  The obvious answer is that they don’t need to.  And, if they don’t need to, others don’t either.  It could be that contrary to the expectation that digital content will continue to be consolidated, the wheel of reincarnation may be turning to a phase of dramatic decentralization and distribution.  Perhaps content provision and curation may become entirely separate as it’s necessarily a compromised relationship anyway.  I’m aware of at least one new technology start-up, The Hawaii Project, which is consistent with that technology culture change.

Around 1150 Chaco was abandoned and the culture that dominated the Colorado Plateau decentralized.  Perhaps the image of the Crab Nebula super nova hidden in plain sight on the path to Peñasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon was interpreted as a prophesy of that event.