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Of the five senses,

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vision is the one that I appreciate the most,

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and it's the one that I can least take for granted.

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I think this is partially due to my father, who was blind.

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It was a fact that he didn't make much of a fuss about, usually.

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One time in Nova Scotia,

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when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun --

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yeah, same one as in the Carly Simon song,

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which may or may not refer

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to James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure.

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They handed out these dark plastic viewers

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that allowed us to look directly at the sun

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without damaging our eyes.

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But Dad got really scared:

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he didn't want us doing that.

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He wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers

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so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged.

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I thought this was a little strange at the time.

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What I didn't know at the time

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was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight.

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When he and his sister Martha were just very little,

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their mom took them out to see a total eclipse --

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or actually, a solar eclipse --

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and not long after that,

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both of them started losing their eyesight.

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Decades later,

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it turned out that the source of their blindness

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was most likely some sort of bacterial infection.

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As near as we can tell,

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it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse,

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but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave

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thinking it was her fault.

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So, Dad graduated Harvard in 1946,

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married my mom,

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and bought a house in Lexington, Massachusetts,

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where the first shots were fired against the British in 1775,

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although we didn't actually hit any of them until Concord.

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He got a job working for Raytheon,

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designing guidance systems,

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which was part of the Route 128 high-tech axis in those days --

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so the equivalent of Silicone Valley in the '70s.

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Dad wasn't a real militaristic kind of guy;

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he just really felt bad that he wasn't able to fight in World War II

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on account of his handicap,

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although they did let him get through

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the several-hour-long army physical exam

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before they got to the very last test,

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which was for vision.

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(Laughter)

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So, Dad started racking up all of these patents

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and gaining a reputation as a blind genius, rocket scientist, inventor.

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But to us he was just Dad,

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and our home life was pretty normal.

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As a kid, I watched a lot of television

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and had lots of nerdy hobbies

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like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program

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and a little bit of politics.

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I played a lot of chess.

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But at the age of 14,

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a friend of mine got me interested in comic books,

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and I decided that was what I wanted to do for a living.

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So, here's my dad:

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he's a scientist, he's an engineer and he's a military contractor.

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So, he has four kids, right?

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One grows up to become a computer scientist,

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one grows up to join the Navy,

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one grows up to become an engineer,

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and then there's me:

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the comic book artist.

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(Laughter)

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Which, incidentally, makes me the opposite of Dean Kamen,

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because I'm a comic book artist, son of an inventor,

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and he's an inventor, son of a comic book artist.

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(Laughter)

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Right, it's true.

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(Applause)

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The funny thing is, Dad had a lot of faith in me.

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He had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist,

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even though he had no direct evidence that I was any good whatsoever:

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everything he saw was just a blur.

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Now, this gives a real meaning to the term "blind faith,"

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which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people.

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Now, faith in things which cannot be seen, which cannot be proved,

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is not the sort of faith that I've ever really related to all that much.

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I tend to like science,

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where what we see

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and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know.

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But there's a middle ground, too.

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A middle ground tread by people like poor old Charles Babbage,

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and his steam-driven computers that were never built.

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Nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind,

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except for Ada Lovelace,

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and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream.

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Vannevar Bush with his Memex --

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this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips --

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he had this vision.

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And I think a lot of people in his day

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probably thought he was a bit of a kook.

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And, yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say,

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yeah, ha-ha, you know -- it's all microfilm. But that's --

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that's not the point. He understood the shape of the future.

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So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction.

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Same thing: he understood the shape of the future,

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even though it was something that would

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only be implemented by people much later.

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Or Paul Baran, and his vision for packet switching.

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Hardly anybody listened to him in his day.

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Or even the people who actually pulled it off,

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the people at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston,

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who just would sketch out these structures

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of what would eventually become a worldwide network,

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and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers

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and arguing over dinner at Howard Johnson's --

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on Route 128 in Lexington, Massachusetts,

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just two miles from where I was studying the Queen's Gambit Deferred

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and listening to Gladys Knight & the Pips

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singing "Midnight Train to Georgia," while --

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(Laughter)

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-- in my dad's big easy chair, you know?

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So, three types of vision, right?

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Vision based on what one cannot see:

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the vision of that unseen and unknowable.

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The vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained.

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And this third kind

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of vision, of something which

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can be, which may be,

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based on knowledge, but is as yet unproven.

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Now, we've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science,

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but I think it's also true in the arts, it's true in politics,

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it's even true in personal endeavors.

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What it comes down to, really, is four basic principles:

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learn from everyone,

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follow no one,

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watch for patterns,

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and work like hell.

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I think these are the four principles that go into this.

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And it's that third one, especially,

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where visions of the future

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begin to manifest themselves.

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What's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world,

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is, I think, only one of four different ways

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that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor.

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In comics, I know that

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it results in sort of a formalist attitude

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towards trying to understand how it works.

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Then there's another, more classical, attitude

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which embraces beauty and craft.

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Another one which believes in the pure transparency of content.

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And then another

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which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience --

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and honesty, and rawness.

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These are four very different ways of looking at the world. I even gave them names.

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The classicist, the animist, and formalist and iconoclast.

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Interestingly, it seemed to correspond more or less

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to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought.

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And they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight

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on left and the right;

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tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom.

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And if you go on the diagonal, you get content and form --

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and then beauty and truth.

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And it probably applies just as much

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to music and to movies and to fine art,

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which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all,

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or for that matter, nothing to do with our conference theme of

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"Inspired by Nature" --

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except to the extent of the fable of the frog

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who gives the ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river

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because the scorpion promises not to sting him,

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but then the scorpion does sting him anyway and they both die,

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but not before the frog asks him why and the scorpion says,

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"Because it's my nature" --

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in that sense, yes.

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(Laughter)

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So --

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so this was my nature. The thing was, I saw

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that the route that I took to discovering

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this focus in my work

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and who I was,

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I saw it as just this road to discovery.

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Actually, it was just me embracing my nature,

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which means

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that I didn't actually fall that far from the tree after all.

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So what does a "scientific mind"

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do in the arts?

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Well, I started making comics,

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but I also started trying to understand them, almost immediately.

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And one of the most important things about comics, I discovered,

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was that comics are a visual medium,

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but they try to embrace all of the senses within it.

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So, the different elements of comics, like pictures and words,

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and the different symbols and everything in between

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that comics presents

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are all funneled through the single conduit of vision.

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So you have things like resemblance,

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where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted

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in a couple of different directions:

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abstracted from resemblance,

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but still retaining the complete meaning,

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or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plan.

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Put all these three together, and you have a nice little map

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of the entire boundary of visual iconography

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which comics can embrace.

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And if you move to the right you also get language,

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because that's abstracting even further from resemblance,

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but still maintaining meaning.

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Vision is called upon to represent sound

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and to understand the common properties of those two

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and their common heritage, as well.

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Also, to try to represent the texture of sound

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to capture its essential character through visuals.

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And there's also a balance

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between the visible and the invisible in comics.

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Comics is a kind of call and response

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in which the artist gives you

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something to see within the panels,

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and then gives you something to imagine between the panels.

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Also, another sense

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which comics' vision represents, and that's time.

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Sequence is a very important aspect of comics.

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Comics presents a kind of temporal map.

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And this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics,

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but I was wondering if perhaps it also energizes

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other sorts of forms,

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and I found some in history.

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And you can see this same principle operating

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in these ancient versions of the same idea.

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What's happening is, the art form is colliding

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with the given technology,

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whether it's paint on stone, like the Tomb of the Scribe in ancient Egypt,

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or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column,

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or a 200-foot-long embroidery,

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or painted deerskin and tree bark

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running across 88 accordion-folded pages.

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What's interesting is, once you hit print --

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and this is from 1450, by the way --

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all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves:

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rectilinear panel arrangements,

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simple line drawings without tone

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and a left-to-right reading sequence.

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And within 100 years,

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you already start to see word balloons and captions,

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and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from here to here.

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So I wrote a book about this in '93,

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but as I was finishing the book,

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I had to do a little bit of typesetting,

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and I was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it,

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so I bought a computer.

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And it was just a little thing -- it wasn't good for much except text entry --

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but my father had told me about Moore's Law,

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about Moore's Law back in the '70s, and I knew what was coming.

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And so, I kept my eyes peeled

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to see if the sort of changes that happened

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when we went from pre-print comics to print comics

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would happen when we went beyond, to post-print comics.

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So, one of the first things that were proposed

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was that we could mix the visuals of comics

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with the sound, motion and interactivity

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of the CD-ROMs that were being made in those days.

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This was even before the Web.

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And one of the first things they did was,

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they tried to take the comics page as-is

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and transplant it to monitors,

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which was a classic McLuhanesque mistake

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of appropriating the shape of the previous technology

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as the content of the new technology.

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And so, what they would do is,

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they'd have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages,

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and they would introduce all this sound and motion.

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The problem was, that if you go with this idea --

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this basic idea that space equals time in comics --

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what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion,

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which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time,

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then they break with that continuity of presentation.

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Interactivity was another thing.

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There were hypertext comics.

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But the thing about hypertext

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is that everything in hypertext is either here, not here or connected to here;

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it's profoundly non-spatial.

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The distance from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln penny,

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the Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan

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to "Plan 9" to nine lives:

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it's all the same.

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(Laughter)

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And -- but in comics, in comics,

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every aspect of the work, every element of the work

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has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times.

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So the question was:

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was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship

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while still taking advantage of all of the things

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that digital had to offer us?

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And I found my personal answer for this

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in those ancient comics that I was showing you.

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Each of them has a single unbroken reading line,

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whether it's going zigzag across the walls

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or spiraling up a column

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or just straight left to right, or even going in a backwards zigzag

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across those 88 accordion-folded pages.

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The same thing is happening, and that is that the basic idea

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that as you move through space you move through time

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is being carried out without any compromise,

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but there were compromises when print hit.

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Adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments,

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so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again

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and again and again.

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And I thought, O.K., well,

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if that's true, is there any way,

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when we go beyond today's print,

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to somehow bring that back?

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Now, the monitor

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is just as limited as the page, technically, right?

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It's a different shape, but other than that

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it's the same basic limitation.

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But that's only if you look at the monitor as a page,

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but not if you look at the monitor as a window.

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And that's what I proposed: that perhaps we could create these comics

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on an infinite canvas:

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along the X axis and the Y axis and staircases.

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We could do circular narratives that were literally circular.

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We could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn.

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Parallel narratives could be literally parallel.

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X, Y and also Z.

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So I had all these notions. This was back in the late '90s,

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and other people in my business thought I was pretty crazy,

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but a lot of people then went on and actually did it.

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I'm going to show you a couple now.

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This was an early collage comic by a fellow named Jason Lex.

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And notice what's going on here.

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What I'm searching for is a durable mutation --

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that's what all of us are searching for.

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As media head into this new era,

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we are looking for mutations

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that are durable, that have some sort of staying power.

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Now, we're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium,

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and then we're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end.

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That's that entire comic you just saw

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is up on the screen right now.

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But even though we're only experiencing it one piece at a time,

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that's just where the technology is right now.

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As the technology evolves,

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as you get full immersive displays and whatnot,

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this sort of thing will only grow.

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It will adapt. It will

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adapt to its environment:

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it's a durable mutation.

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Here's another one I'll show you. This is by Drew Weing;

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this is called,

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"Pup Contemplates the Heat Death of the Universe."

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See what's going on here

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as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas

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is you're creating a more pure expression

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of what this medium is all about.

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We'll go by this a little quickly -- you get the idea.

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I just want to get to the last panel.

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(Laughter)

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There we go.

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(Laughter)

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(Laughter)

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Just one more.

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Talk about your infinite canvas.

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It's by a guy named Daniel Merlin Goodbrey in Britain.

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Why is this important?

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I think this is important because media,

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all media,

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provide us a window back into our world.

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Now, it could be that motion pictures --

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and eventually, virtual reality, or something equivalent to it --

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some sort of immersive display,

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is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we're in.

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That's why most people turn to storytelling, is to escape.

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But media provides us with a window

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back into the world that we live in.

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And when media evolve

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so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique.

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Because what you're looking at is, you're looking at comics cubed:

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you're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they've ever been before.

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When that happens, you provide people with multiple ways

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of re-entering the world through different windows,

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and when you do that, it allows them to triangulate the world that they live in

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and see its shape.

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And that's why I think this is important.

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One of many reasons, but I've got to go now.

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Thank you for having me.