“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” ~ Buckminster R. Fuller
“Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the ‘device’ to fade away.” ~ Sundar Pichai
ACT III - Places, Chapter III
NOW that we have established some of the gaps and holes in places as holistic spaces – from lack of footfall to failing retail to venue obsolescence – it’s time to consider world-building. Not in Genghis Khan terms but in transmedia and Hollywood terms. World-building is the term given in the narrative and performance arts to the process of extending character and story across multiple situations, scenarios and plotlines. This is in fact what you are doing with a holographic strategy – be that for a sports arena, a factory network, a cultural quarter or a retail complex. Plot, character and storyworld are the three essential components of narrative strategy, and it’s best to start at the maximum radius – storyworld – to begin.
Building your storyworld means understanding the dimensionality of your available space. It means knowing that space is multi-functional once you add holography. It means maximizing the outside as well as the inside of your space. And, mostly, it means understanding your space across periods of time, i.e. episodic holograms. The holistic nature of holograms immerses humans in live experiences, but they must be weaved together in some meaningful sequence if Theseus is to penetrate to the heart of the labyrinth. Which is what your space is to its proposed visitor or audience – a complex labyrinth which repels initial entry and duration.
Space is money. You know, quantum scientists reckon that the vast bulk of everyone and everything is in fact pure space. The oscillating distances between our nuclei and our electrons mean that our bodies internally are simply energetic space. Space is not just outside us – it’s everywhere, it’s at our core. Space is the essential nature of things – de rerum natura as the Roman poet Lucretius would have us remember. Understanding the fundamentals of existence may seem extraneous to building holographic habitats, but it helps.
It helps because you see all this as natural and designed, not just experimental and excessive. What you are doing in building your spatial realm is as natural as the planet. The energy that moves your realm is not gravity but human emotion. Energie folgt Aufmerksamkeit as the Germans say – energy follows attention. In this case the attention is not advertising. Advertising, with minor exceptions, is attention theft. Narrative is earned attention. Messages are attention theft. Drama is earned, voluntarily engaged with. Shakespeare has not survived for almost half a millennium because he had a marketing budget – he thrives because he emotes like us.
If you walk around modern Rome, you don’t really get the feel of the world’s old metropolis, the city that ruled the universe. But step inside the Pantheon, that vast temple with its unique domed vault and amazing oculus letting in pillars of slanting sunshine, and you are right back at the year dot with the locals. This is also the impact of the spatial realm, the immersive effect that puts you right in the center of things. Wherever you are, you are ‘being there’ so completely. And you are certainly not distracted by some screen big or small.
I have worked in all kinds of spaces – arenas, conference centers, lecture halls, shopping malls, museums – and I’ve acquired learnings and insights along the way. Start by pulling your attention back from the screen version of your space – in other words consciously return in your imagination to your physical locus. Whatever your digital footprint and social media ripple, leave it alone for now. Consider the bricks, re-imagine the mortar. Your physical space has been drained of huge amounts of human creativity and imagination in the last quarter century as we’ve all built up our digital storyworlds. But now it’s time to bridge the gap between virtual and real. We’ve stared at screens for so long the virtual has become real, the once real has become strangely unreal. It’s time to make it super-real again – what the French term surreal. To superimpose a new sense of extra, augmented realism.
Surrealism wasn’t meant as an escape from the modern world. Far from it. It was meant to renew and regenerate our relationship with the world around us, to reconnect us all once more. It is no mystery why Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí was such an avid fan of holograms – because they embraced the entire image. Images, like our very lives, are three-dimensional. You have a physical space and it’s now time to reinvent how it performs. To renew the human relationship with your shop, with your cinema, your theater, your airport, your station – your storyworld.
The next step beyond receiving your complete spatial potential is to move away from the marketing impulse. This is not your next opportunity to spam us. This space is really ours. You own it, but we use it. You rent it – we live it. So the shop window is not an opportunity to advertise your wares, it’s a new chance to dramatize the lives of your customers. They say that stories must fulfill three prerequisites to be stories. They must be eventful. In other words, they must involve a transformation of some sort. Not paint drying. Something must happen. Secondly, they must be tellable, in other words they must have an actual language and causality of their own – an idiom and a plotline. To tell means originally to count (from the German word Zahl for number) but what you are recounting is human drama, not product specifications. Arithmetic and trigonometry have inbuilt measuring systems – they add, subtract, divide, multiply and measure the angle. But our metrics are the measures we humans give to life itself – a continuous progression of hormones and emotions. These narremes or basic units of narrative are the stuff of existence. These are what are hard-baked into our rituals and feast days. What is the initial narreme necessary for an audience member? A story event triggering curiosity and empathy.
Before we look at that, consider the third and most important attribute of human narratives – what Hollywood calls relatability. This is the hardest one to get right for brands, because brands don’t always want to relate to you – they want you to relate to them. Brands operate on narcissistic FOMO – they want you to fear of missing them out. But they are the ones missing out on us – and their spatial realm should reflect that.
Eventfulness, tellability and relatability should be the catchwords of your holographic strategy. Something must happen in the realm, not just a product spinning in air. Some narrative progression must drive the sequence of holograms. This is what the ancient Greeks called the fabula, giving us our words fable and fabulous. Fables are magic stories, stories that survive the passage of time and are always new. What is fabulous is literally what propels our human attention, what is literally celebrated in fable.
Is your spatial realm fabulous yet?
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A few thoughts from Author and Holographer, Paul Duffy
I really had a lot of fun researching and working on this chapter. It's a bit deep, but at it's core I define the spatial realm as the enrichment of real space through holographic people, products, places and data to become a highly immersive, interactive habitat.
Midway through the prologue Watch This Space, I layout the four grand stages in the development or evolution of the spatial realm and right now we exist between the first two.
The first phase is the use of holograms as single entities or events in themselves. These are holograms as display – an advertisement, a standalone memory. Think of a 3D model, viewed in AR on your smartphone that you can pinch, zoom and rotate, then add-to-cart.
The next phase is the narrative turn, as storytelling informs groups of holograms and transforms single transactions into continuing relationships. In commerce, for instance, that means the focus shifts from the point of purchase to the entire customer journey from awareness to recycling.
The narrative evolution of holography is about to emerge and it will happen quicker then we think given our current technological capabilities and devices.
Apple Vision Pro anyone?
~ Paul Duffy, June 2023.