The Golden Age (Literally) of Visualization Is Here: But Don't Expect To Interact. Lean Back!

NFTs are the logical outcome of many developments in modern computing technology that span decades of experimentation at the intersection of art and technology. Computationally-generated animations have been created since the 60s, and yet they never achieved mass popular appeal until only recently with the explosive NFT boom.

Frankly, I can say with fully credentialed assurances that what makes NTFs special is not the quality of the artwork. No shade, of course, to all the cool NFT creators out there. Instead, what makes NFTs so special is their timely connection to the commercial possibilities they've brought to the creator and collector ecosystem — thanks in all parts to the maturity of cryptocurrency as a viable economic medium.

The Early Days: OpenStudio

In the early 2000s, I led a group of researchers at MIT that created what's probably one of the world's first digital marketplaces for artists. It was called "OpenStudio." We even had a cryptocurrency unit that was called the "βurak" (instead of Bitcoin) — named after the one team member we trusted above all. His name of course was, "Burak." OpenStudio had the ability to author artworks and enable any member of the network to "fork" the artwork. In other words and like with Github, members had the ability to edit/remix a work into a new artwork. And in turn, you could re-sell that artwork as your own, but with a clearly marked provenance to the chain of creators that contributed along the way. We hadn't figured out a definitive way to convert βuraks into dollars yet, but we we certainly thinking of ways we could do it.

I think back that if we were pitching it as a startup, it would have been "Photoshop meets Github meets Bitcoin." The only problem, of course, was that Github and Bitcoin weren't words in the vernacular, yet. As with many ideas we built back in that era at MIT, they were way too early for consumption. The definition of innovation is always to be too early — which isn't a good idea if you're trying to shoot for commercial success. That is, unless you are arriving at the Goldilocks moment of not too early and not too late. You're at the juuuuuust right time. Timing's everything, isn't it?

OpenStudio had maybe 200+ users at its peak. So the network effect required to make it into something of value (i.e. equating to the number of eyeballs participating in the membership) didn't yet make sense. Many years later and especially after my venture capital adventure in the Valley, I can imagine that if I hadn't left MIT in 2008 to go and run the Rhode Island School of Design, we all could have launched a startup based upon the technology and the underlying ideas. But like most startups, its momentum likely would have petered out because the idea was still way, way too early. Or, so I like to think to myself these days. LOL.

Computational Art = Visualization = Computational Design = Interaction

There's so much history to how the intersection of computation (i.e. code) and the artistic domain have overlapped. This short article really can't do the topic justice — I wrote a book on the topic entitled Design By Numbers for MIT Press back in the 90s if it's new to you. And if the idea of "computation" is a bit blurry for you, then there's How To Speak Machine that helps you speak un poco computation to get started. If you are a more hands-on person, I strongly recommend that you check out the world of Processing where a lot of activity is percolating that absolutely blows my mind.

The impact of computation on the world of art and design from a commerce perspective is something I started chronicling in 2015 with the Design in Tech Report series. A few years later, I figured out that the key was *computation* and the issues of access around tapping into the power of computational machinery. I've since then branched out into a variety of spaces in search of the thing that could bring it all into perspective for me. I think I found it.

The ability to take what is truly abstract and make it even slightly more concrete outside of our heads — we can do this now at a level that I find it hard to comprehend. You too? And that's the point. We've exceeded our own abilities to think a la the proverbial diagram that Kurzweil has shown to illustrate the so-called "Singularity." The kinds of illustrations we can computationally generate using computers helps to (literally) depict the complexity that's managed within the cloud today. In the most simplistic terms I think:

The key is visualization.

Well, let's be more inclusive here — and let me sharpen the notion of visualization as not what you can see, but instead what your mind can "see." The computational ability to crunch and process information into new information is truly unprecedented. Machine learning is a great example of this phenomenon. Because there's a limit to how much we humans can tolerate when it comes to solving multiple equations with multiple unknowns — especially when those unknowns number in the many thousands. The computer's ability to process so much more information than we ever could have achieved inside our heads is truly phenomenal. How To Speak Machine provides some guidance for how to understand what I'm talking about here ... it's really quite abstract, but it gets super concrete when it's happening inside the space of computation. It all makes sense if you can speak machine. It all doesn't make sense when you can't. The digital divide persists across many boundaries.

In Summary

As you can tell, I watched the new Matrix movie over the holidays. So let me try and boil down what I've said above into something more concrete:

• We value creativity especially when it has monetary value. Unless there's an economy built around creativity, it's just a "nice to have."
• Computer graphics animation was the purview of math researchers for a long time. It took Pixar's collective might to create CGI into an entire industry.
• Computer user interfaces weren't valuable until they moved from the command line to the GUI at mass with the Mac. GUIs are computationally generated experiences.
• NFTs are computational art, and some NFTs are $€￡￥ valuable. For some creators and collectors today, they are a "need to have" because a tangible market exists.
• It's taken a long time to create the technological means to build a collectors market for digital tokens. A lot of folks have been waiting for this moment.
• Everything we consume today in tech is a form of visualization. In general, they are computationally-generated visualizations that are interactive in nature.
• NFTs are especially interesting because they mainly exist to be consumed in a passive form. That's likely helped their adoption significantly. Why? Because interactivity takes energy to elicit from a computational form; why interact when you can lean back?

The golden (= $€￡￥) age of visualization in business is likely to grow around this subtle aspect of NFTs: emphasis on the the lean-back approach to experiencing information. I know that sounds odd coming from someone who helped to foster the space of "reactive graphics" back in the 90s ... and whoever thought that the word "React" would become one of the core foundations of the web and mobile today? Certainly not me. But I'm glad to have played a little part in how things have turned out. And I'm even more excited about what I'm doing right now at Everbridge. Stay tuned! —JM