MoMA’s Talk To Me exhibit ended up giving me the spark I needed.
I’ve been faced with a struggle where my intrinsic nature to create has been parked by an inability to choose a path or method in which to produce—I want to make something with impact, but what? My career has taken me into the world of web technologies but I’ve never been excited or curious enough to jump into discovering the language of the web.
“Talk To Me” helped me discover something. Though it’s where my friends and colleagues focus their creative efforts, there are plenty of other playgrounds for me to build in. Communications have always been an interest for me. Lately, I’ve thought that without a knowledge of code or the curiosity that’s required to put in hundreds of hours of learning, I would be relegated to the old-fashioned device of communication through plain English. What I saw on that afternoon in the “museum” (I’ve always thought museums were for antiquated but not forgotten treasures.) wasn’t surprising from a technical standpoint but helped me discover a key element of what I was passionate about but hadn’t acknowledged. Creating ideas was one thing but I needed to be able to communicate those ideas in a way that was captivating and relative to what I was sharing. No one wants to read an essay on the impact of digital communication but visualizing it through applications or converting those digital conversations into an analog (or real life, not on your iPhone) exchange.
Create ideas through words. Proliferate ideas through technology.
It’s not about code being the building blocks of some thing but the nouns and verbs of tomorrow’s language. Code is communication and technology becomes the medium to tell stories. That’s what media has always been about. As evolution in how we read, listen, and watch these stories occurs, I need to continue to produce the platforms in which we communicate. I can do that in ways other than building responsive web sites or APIs. Maybe it becomes something like Arduino projects or turning statuses into stories and sharing what our generation has to say. That’s enough to inspire me and instill a level of curiosity to learn tomorrows languages.