Writing

It's 11:30am and Apple has failed us. The technology hooking a MacBook Pro to the giant projector on stage has temporarily vanished. The digital revolution has momentarily stalled and this is all rather unfortunate given I'm attending the 1st Alpha-ville Symposium on Post-digital culture.

Not that the iPhone-scrolling and laptop-tapping audience need worry, because within 15 minutes we’re back on track and ready to hear what Tom Uglow (director of Google Creative Labs), Katy Beale (director at Caper), and Filip Visnjic (lecturer and founder of Creative Applications Network) have to say about the post-digital condition.

We begin with Tom Uglow, a self-confessed geek for whom post-digital culture encompasses the spirit of The Johnny Cash Project – a participatory website where everyone draws a frame from the same music video. In this project, technology is more than just ‘a cool thing to look at’; it facilitates a collaborative visual experiment on a global stage. Within this experiment, everyone becomes designer, artist, and coder; anyone can edit and contribute to the Johnny Cash video and in the process fulfil one of Filip Visnjic's key post-digital principles: "learning by doing." Katy Beale agrees that interaction drives post-digital creativity and the Culture Hack Days, Beale’s company runs, are full of creative digital crafting to help humanise data.

So post-digital culture evokes participation, interaction, and a blurring across disciplines through merging technologies, but when did this happen? And why do I feel less like a post-digital person and more like Information Designer Moritz Stefaner, who sheepishly admitted during his session, "I have a feeling we are still pre-digital, for me it has not come together yet."

The transition from pre to post-digital snuck by mostly unattested because digital culture permeates everywhere. And surely digital ubiquity is why the Alpha-ville Festival exists to begin with; it’s why audience members tweeted questions to speakers instead of putting their hands up, it’s why I started taking notes on my iPad instead of the notebook beside me – we are now so effortlessly digital that we no longer notice the digital landscape as anything new or different.

But technology writer Bill Thompson would rather we did notice – in fact, for him, its imperative we notice. A highlight for me was his searing critique of Apple's App Store, during which Thompson ripped into closed systems dominating the Web. The Web was founded on open values where anyone could create and build upon any code, but with companies like Apple using vendor lock-in to keep us wired-up to Apple products, we’re in danger of losing variety – because when architectures of control emerge, choice is lost. Thompson ended his critique with a rallying call-to-arms to creatives and coders: asking us to adopt open systems and to continue what he called mischief-making online.

There was plenty of mischief to be found in the works of Keiichi Matsuda and Ben Stevenson, whose mesmerising examples of augmented reality hinted at a world where reality and layered media collide. Matsuda's film Augmented (hyper)Reality: Augmented City shows how the physical and virtual can be seen together, as one dynamic whole – and if you haven’t seen the film before it’s definitely worth watching (especially with 3D glasses!)

Yet for all the post-digital fanfare, as the symposium drew to a close I couldn’t shake the idea that post-digital was showing us a circus of mirrors – deceptively and deliberately vague; it provokes endless reflection. And the technical hitch at the start was clear: the (not so) old digital still needs some fine-tuning.

Luckily, digital culture wants us to interfere; it invites us into the sprawling, unpredictable mess of old and new and asks us to re-imagine. The digital revolution is rolling every which way it can and it's thrilling – Bill Thompson is right: "the online city needs its dangerous spaces."

Originally published on the London Design Festival Blog.