Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is probably best known as a pioneer of Virtual Reality technology but is probably best described as a modern Renaissance man--an eclectic mix of computer programmer, inventor, musician, artist and futurist. He divides his time between California and New York (where he has positions as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and as a visiting artist at New York University), but he can always be found in cyberspace.

Scientific American editor Corey S. Powell caught up with Jaron Lanier in the summer of 1996, to hear some of his current thoughts on the World Wide Web, synthetic worlds and other silicon dreams.

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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: I'd like to start by asking you about the video feedback waterbed [a project exhibited at the Exit Art gallery in New York]. It seems to show your interests in art, music and technology all blurring into each other. There it is in a visual art gallery, but it is also a clever piece of video feedback equipment and a music machine.

JARON LANIER: Well, the theme of the Exit Art exhibition was environments meant for listening to music, so I conceived it to fit into that theme. The waterbed is bit of an experiment in several areas. One of them is in social spaces, as you pointed out; you enter this environment of ambiguous intimacy. I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite affect.

Another part of what I had in mind really was sort of as an antidote to cutting-edgism. Sometimes I think it's important to work explicitly with technologies that are a little out of fashion and a little out of date. It' s the only way to get a perspective that's a little bit higher than you get at the cutting edge of technology. There are no degrees of freedom when you're constantly moving in one direction: more-advanced, more- advanced, more-advanced. Everything about this waterbed piece is very retro. Waterbeds are sort of a 1970s thing. Video Feedback is sort of a '70s, maybe a '60s thing.

SA: Does that mean you see sort of a retro, video-feedback element in Virtual Reality (VR)?

JL: No, no. Actually, VR is just the reverse. Virtual Reality, if anything, hasn't quite happened yet. We still need more computer power, better-quality displays, better sensors. We're still very much at the edge, and even the very best Virtual Reality systems that can be built today with an unlimited budget are not quite what I want them to be. So in the area of Virtual Reality, I am constantly working in that world of the cutting edge. Which is very exciting--I am not putting it down.

I've been thinking about this a bit lately, that in the history of Western art--or at least in music, since that's the art I know the best--being on the edge has been an incredible driver for people. There's always been this very special charge associated with coming up with a new musical chord or a chord progression that people haven't heard before, or a new musical instrument. Hearing a contra-bassoon for the first time was a huge thrill for people, I'm sure.

SA: In one of your essays, you describe musical instruments and warfare as two of the main drivers of technological progress.

JL: Right. This notion of constantly pushing forward with better and better technology and more advanced science is very dear to me, but I do think that it's too constricting to spend one's entire life in that mode. Sometimes you have to be able to work outside of it.

It's a bit of a challenge. If you can come up with a new idea using new technology, the results come almost automatically. For example, the first person who develops a Virtual Reality--which in this case was me!-- automatically gets to do original work with it. But coming up with something original to do with an old technology, now that's really a challenge, because it means you have to come up with something that nobody else has come up with before. That's what brought me to the waterbed. It's just a normal video camera and some big mirrors and a waterbed--that's it!

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