In October 2002, just before rehearsals for the Live Performance element of Alladeen began in New York, Associate Dramaturg Charlotte Stoudt checked in with Martha Baer, in the middle of rewrites for the Alladeen script. The interview, appropriately enough, took place over the phone.

What are the first three words you think of when someone says "Aladdin"?
Lamp, jinn, pantaloons.

From the vantage point of Wired magazine, what gets your attention in terms of the way technology is changing our lives and our assumptions about what is possible?
Well, I'm an editor at Wired, and being an editor is all about storytelling--that doesn't change no matter what the subject matter. You can have the inside exclusive on the coolest technology but if the storytelling is weak, it doesn't mean anything.

In terms of technology, I'm fascinated by miniaturization—it's pretty remarkable how many operations can be accomplished using ever smaller devices. With miniaturization and the constant downward pressure on prices, we'll probably get to a point where most of these devices will be disposable. And with all sorts of disposable sensor technology around us, we'll really be living in a knowledge web—constantly being fed all sorts of data about our environment. At any given moment multiple forms of data-gathering will be working everywhere around you.

I'm also struck by the quantity of data out there. So much data that we haven't even dreamed up applications for it. For example I'm editing this piece about particle physicists who are using old data that had been stored by seismology scientists. I mean, these physicists can use pre-existing data from an entirely different field to make leaps in their own field. This cross-disciplinary deepening of knowledge is cool--but also frightening. Because the other side of it is greater specialization—there are these "mono specialties" in which one hand doesn't know what the other's doing. We have systems so complex that no single individual understands how to run them. Or fix them.

Alladeen attempts the same thing in a way: this is a cross-disciplinary project amongst some people who have never met, let alone share the same skills.
Exactly. But of course, that's what makes it interesting.

Some of your work examines the way identity shifts in cyberspace. Can you talk about how the web changes our sense of who we are, or who we can become?
I think what's changed on a daily basis is the way that educated people manage information in a fragmentary way. Everything's attacked at such a granular scale, one does several things at the same time: emailing, studying, surfing the web. Does this fragmenting of our attention reduce the quality of what we accomplish? That's the standard thinking, but what if you take as your point of departure that this multitasking doesn't diminish the quality of experience? People move with amazing fluidity between tasks. We wouldn't know how versatile we are without this technology. Maybe we are multi-track by nature.

But in the end what's most important about all of this technology is how it is integrated into the advance of capitalism. Cutting-edge technology is still serving old-fashioned interests. Take fibre optics. The whole call centre industry, among other things, is all made possible because light pulses through glass. But what drove the development of that capability? Someone said, "If we could invent a product that would make telecommunications move faster … we could, say, handle our customer service from cheaper labor markets, so … fibre gets laid along all the ocean floors." Huge plastic cables filled with threads of glass stretched around the globe—that's fundamentally the result of layers and layers of market incentive.


top

go to page 1 | 2