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00:00:00,721 --> 00:00:03,976
Of the five senses, vision is the one
that I appreciate the most,

2
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:06,976
and it's the one that I can
least take for granted.

3
00:00:07,650 --> 00:00:10,551
I think this is partially due
to my father, who was blind.

4
00:00:10,575 --> 00:00:13,678
It was a fact that he didn't make
much of a fuss about, usually.

5
00:00:13,702 --> 00:00:17,336
One time in Nova Scotia, when we went
to see a total eclipse of the sun --

6
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(Laughter)

7
00:00:18,402 --> 00:00:20,491
Yeah, same one as in the Carly Simon song,

8
00:00:20,515 --> 00:00:23,339
which may or may not refer
to James Taylor, Warren Beatty

9
00:00:23,363 --> 00:00:25,195
or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure.

10
00:00:25,219 --> 00:00:27,755
They handed out these dark plastic viewers

11
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that allowed us to look
directly at the sun

12
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without damaging our eyes.

13
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But Dad got really scared;
he didn't want us doing that.

14
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He wanted us instead to use
these cheap cardboard viewers,

15
00:00:36,785 --> 00:00:40,445
so that there was no chance at all
that our eyes would be damaged.

16
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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

18
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was that my father had actually
been born with perfect eyesight.

19
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When he and his sister Martha
were just very little,

20
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their mom took them out
to see a total eclipse --

21
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or actually, a solar eclipse --

22
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and not long after that, both of them
started losing their eyesight.

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Decades later, it turned out
that the source of their blindness

24
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was most likely some sort
of bacterial infection.

25
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As near as we can tell,
it had nothing whatsoever to do

26
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with that solar eclipse,

27
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but by then my grandmother
had already gone to her grave

28
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thinking it was her fault.

29
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So, Dad graduated Harvard in 1946,

30
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married my mom,

31
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and bought a house
in Lexington, Massachusetts,

32
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where the first shots were fired
against the British in 1775,

33
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although we didn't actually hit
any of them until Concord.

34
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He got a job working for Raytheon
designing guidance systems,

35
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which was part of the Route 128
high-tech axis in those days --

36
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so, the equivalent
of Silicon Valley in the '70s.

37
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Dad wasn't a real
militaristic kind of guy;

38
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he just felt bad that he wasn't able
to fight in World War II

39
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on account of his handicap,

40
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although they did let him get through

41
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the several-hour-long army physical exam

42
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before they got to the very last test,
which was for vision.

43
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(Laughter)

44
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So Dad started racking
up all of these patents

45
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and gaining a reputation as a blind
genius, rocket scientist, inventor.

46
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But to us he was just Dad,
and our home life was pretty normal.

47
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As a kid, I watched a lot of television

48
00:02:09,262 --> 00:02:12,900
and had lots of nerdy hobbies
like mineralogy and microbiology

49
00:02:12,924 --> 00:02:15,444
and the space program
and a little bit of politics.

50
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I played a lot of chess.

51
00:02:16,712 --> 00:02:19,855
But at the age of 14, a friend
got me interested in comic books,

52
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and I decided that was
what I wanted to do for a living.

53
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So, here's my dad:

54
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he's a scientist, he's an engineer
and he's a military contractor.

55
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So, he has four kids, right?

56
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One grows up to become
a computer scientist,

57
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one grows up to join the Navy,

58
00:02:36,758 --> 00:02:39,000
one grows up to become an engineer ...

59
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And then there's me:
the comic book artist.

60
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(Laughter)

61
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Which, incidentally, makes me
the opposite of Dean Kamen,

62
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because I'm a comic book artist,
son of an inventor,

63
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and he's an inventor,
son of a comic book artist.

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(Laughter)

65
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Right? It's true.

66
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(Applause)

67
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The funny thing is,
Dad had a lot of faith in me.

68
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He had faith in my abilities
as a cartoonist,

69
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even though he had no direct evidence
that I was any good whatsoever;

70
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everything he saw was just a blur.

71
00:03:07,974 --> 00:03:10,686
Now, this gives a real meaning
to the term "blind faith,"

72
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which doesn't have the same
negative connotation for me

73
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that it does for other people.

74
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Now, faith in things which cannot
be seen, which cannot be proved,

75
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is not the sort of faith that I've ever
really related to all that much.

76
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I tend to like science,

77
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where what we see and can ascertain
are the foundation of what we know.

78
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But there's a middle ground, too --

79
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a middle ground tread by people
like poor old Charles Babbage

80
00:03:34,382 --> 00:03:37,167
and his steam-driven computers
that were never built.

81
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Nobody really understood
what it was that he had in mind

82
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except for Ada Lovelace,

83
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and he went to his grave
trying to pursue that dream.

84
00:03:46,978 --> 00:03:49,374
Vannevar Bush with his memex --

85
00:03:49,398 --> 00:03:52,375
this idea of all of human
knowledge at your fingertips --

86
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he had this vision.

87
00:03:53,951 --> 00:03:55,793
And I think a lot of people in his day

88
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probably thought he was a bit of a kook.

89
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And, yeah, we can look back
in retrospect and say,

90
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"Yeah, ha-ha, it's all microfilm --

91
00:04:02,464 --> 00:04:03,487
(Laughter)

92
00:04:03,511 --> 00:04:06,597
But that's not the point;
he understood the shape of the future.

93
00:04:06,621 --> 00:04:11,211
So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions
for computer-human interaction.

94
00:04:11,235 --> 00:04:14,104
Same thing: he understood
the shape of the future,

95
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even though it was something
that would only be implemented

96
00:04:17,754 --> 00:04:19,145
by people much later.

97
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Or Paul Baran, and his vision
for packet switching.

98
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Hardly anybody listened to him in his day.

99
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Or even the people
who actually pulled it off,

100
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the people at Bolt, Beranek
and Newman in Boston,

101
00:04:29,621 --> 00:04:32,533
who just would sketch out these structures

102
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of what would eventually
become a worldwide network,

103
00:04:35,117 --> 00:04:38,735
and sketching things on the back
of napkins and on note papers

104
00:04:38,759 --> 00:04:41,057
and arguing over dinner
at Howard Johnson's --

105
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on Route 128 in Lexington, Massachusetts,

106
00:04:43,495 --> 00:04:46,728
just two miles from where I was studying
the Queen's Gambit Deferred

107
00:04:46,752 --> 00:04:48,852
and listening to Gladys Knight & The Pips

108
00:04:48,876 --> 00:04:51,044
singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" --

109
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(Laughter)

110
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in my dad's big easy chair, you know?

111
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So, three types of vision, right?

112
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Vision based on what one cannot see,

113
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the vision of that unseen and unknowable.

114
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The vision of that which has already
been proven or can be ascertained.

115
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And this third kind, a vision of something
which can be, which may be,

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based on knowledge
but is, as yet, unproven.

117
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Now, we've seen a lot
of examples of people

118
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who are pursuing
that sort of vision in science,

119
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but I think it's also true
in the arts, it's true in politics,

120
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it's even true in personal endeavors.

121
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What it comes down to, really,
is four basic principles:

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learn from everyone;

123
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follow no one;

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watch for patterns;

125
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and work like hell.

126
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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,

128
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where visions of the future
begin to manifest themselves.

129
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What's interesting is that this particular
way of looking at the world,

130
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is, I think, only one
of four different ways

131
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that manifest themselves
in different fields of endeavor.

132
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In comics, I know that it results
in sort of a formalist attitude

133
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towards trying to understand how it works.

134
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Then there's another,
more classical attitude

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which embraces beauty and craft;

136
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another one which believes
in the pure transparency of content;

137
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and then another, which emphasizes
the authenticity of human experience

138
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and honesty and rawness.

139
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These are four very different ways
of looking at the world.

140
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I even gave them names:

141
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the classicist, the animist,
the formalist and iconoclast.

142
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Interestingly, they seem
to correspond more or less

143
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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

145
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on left and the right;

146
00:06:27,630 --> 00:06:30,130
tradition and revolution
on the top and the bottom.

147
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And if you go on the diagonal,
you get content and form,

148
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and then beauty and truth.

149
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And it probably applies just as much
to music and movies and fine art,

150
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which has nothing whatsoever
to do with vision at all,

151
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or, for that matter, nothing to do
with our conference theme

152
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of "Inspired by Nature,"

153
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except to the extent
of the fable of the frog

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

155
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because the scorpion
promises not to sting him,

156
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but the scorpion stings him anyway
and they both die,

157
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but not before the frog asks
him why, and the scorpion says,

158
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"Because it's my nature."

159
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In that sense, yes.

160
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(Laughter)

161
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So this was my nature.

162
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The thing was, I saw that the route I took

163
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to discovering this focus in my work

164
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and who I was --

165
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I saw it as just this road to discovery.

166
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Actually, it was just me
embracing my nature,

167
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which means that I didn't actually fall
that far from the tree, after all.

168
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So what does a "scientific mind"
do in the arts?

169
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I started making comics, but I also
started trying to understand them,

170
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almost immediately.

171
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One of the most important things
about comics that I discovered

172
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was that comics are a visual medium,

173
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but they try to embrace
all of the senses within it.

174
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So, the different elements
of comics, like pictures and words,

175
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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, a vision.

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So we have things like resemblance,

179
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where something which resembles
the physical world can be abstracted

180
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in a couple of different directions:

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abstracted from resemblance,
but still retaining the complete meaning,

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or abstracted away
from both resemblance and meaning

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00:08:06,925 --> 00:08:08,181
towards the picture plane.

184
00:08:08,205 --> 00:08:11,039
Put all these three together,
and you have a nice little map

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00:08:11,063 --> 00:08:13,178
of the entire boundary
of visual iconography,

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00:08:13,202 --> 00:08:14,987
which comics can embrace.

187
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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,

189
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but still maintaining meaning.

190
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Vision is called upon to represent sound

191
00:08:26,251 --> 00:08:29,822
and to understand
the common properties of those two

192
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and their common heritage as well;

193
00:08:32,010 --> 00:08:34,395
also, to try to represent
the texture of sound

194
00:08:34,419 --> 00:08:38,135
to capture its essential
character through visuals.

195
00:08:39,136 --> 00:08:43,243
There's also a balance between the visible
and the invisible in comics.

196
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Comics is a kind of call and response,

197
00:08:46,080 --> 00:08:49,222
in which the artist gives you something
to see within the panels,

198
00:08:49,246 --> 00:08:52,248
and then gives you something
to imagine between the panels.

199
00:08:53,025 --> 00:08:57,290
Also, another sense
which comics' vision represents,

200
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and that's time.

201
00:08:58,984 --> 00:09:01,901
Sequence is a very important
aspect of comics.

202
00:09:02,652 --> 00:09:04,763
Comics presents a kind of temporal map.

203
00:09:05,946 --> 00:09:09,582
And this temporal map was something
that energizes modern comics,

204
00:09:09,606 --> 00:09:12,527
but I was wondering
if perhaps it also energizes

205
00:09:12,551 --> 00:09:14,069
other sorts of forms,

206
00:09:14,093 --> 00:09:15,525
and I found some in history.

207
00:09:16,606 --> 00:09:19,290
You can see this same principle operating

208
00:09:19,314 --> 00:09:22,298
in these ancient versions
of the same idea.

209
00:09:22,322 --> 00:09:23,475
What's happening is,

210
00:09:23,499 --> 00:09:25,841
an art form is colliding
with a given technology,

211
00:09:25,865 --> 00:09:27,206
whether it's paint on stone,

212
00:09:27,230 --> 00:09:29,627
like the Tomb of Menna the Scribe
in ancient Egypt,

213
00:09:29,651 --> 00:09:32,255
or a bas-relief sculpture
rising up a stone column,

214
00:09:32,279 --> 00:09:34,307
or a 200-foot-long embroidery,

215
00:09:34,331 --> 00:09:36,308
or painted deerskin and tree bark

216
00:09:36,332 --> 00:09:38,770
running across 88 accordion-folded pages.

217
00:09:38,794 --> 00:09:40,959
What's interesting is,
once you hit "print" --

218
00:09:40,983 --> 00:09:42,840
and this is from 1450, by the way --

219
00:09:42,864 --> 00:09:45,997
all of the artifacts of modern comics
start to present themselves:

220
00:09:46,021 --> 00:09:47,537
rectilinear panel arrangements,

221
00:09:47,561 --> 00:09:49,329
simple line drawings without tone,

222
00:09:49,353 --> 00:09:51,351
and a left-to-right reading sequence.

223
00:09:52,763 --> 00:09:57,771
And within 100 years, you already start
to see word balloons and captions,

224
00:09:57,795 --> 00:10:00,756
and it's really just a hop, skip
and a jump from here to here.

225
00:10:01,509 --> 00:10:04,944
So I wrote a book about this in '93,
but as I was finishing the book,

226
00:10:04,968 --> 00:10:06,884
I had to do a little bit of typesetting,

227
00:10:06,908 --> 00:10:09,576
and I was tired of going
to my local copy shop to do it,

228
00:10:09,600 --> 00:10:10,845
so I bought a computer.

229
00:10:10,869 --> 00:10:12,543
And it was just a little thing --

230
00:10:12,567 --> 00:10:14,733
it wasn't good for much
except text entry --

231
00:10:14,757 --> 00:10:18,597
but my father had told me
about Moore's law back in the '70s,

232
00:10:18,621 --> 00:10:20,098
and I knew what was coming.

233
00:10:20,549 --> 00:10:23,247
And so, I kept my eyes peeled

234
00:10:23,271 --> 00:10:25,312
to see if the sort
of changes that happened

235
00:10:25,336 --> 00:10:27,946
when we went from pre-print
comics to print comics

236
00:10:27,970 --> 00:10:30,844
would happen when we went beyond,
to post-print comics.

237
00:10:31,335 --> 00:10:33,083
So, one of the first things proposed

238
00:10:33,107 --> 00:10:35,461
was that we could mix
the visuals of comics

239
00:10:35,485 --> 00:10:38,296
with the sound, motion
and interactivity of the CD-ROMs

240
00:10:38,320 --> 00:10:39,526
being made in those days.

241
00:10:39,550 --> 00:10:41,129
This was even before the Web.

242
00:10:41,153 --> 00:10:43,114
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 have these comic pages

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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 basic idea

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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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they break with that continuity
of presentation.

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Interactivity was another thing.

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There were hypertext comics,
but the thing about hypertext

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is that everything in hypertext
is either here, not here,

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or connected to here;

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it's profoundly nonspatial.

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The distance from Abraham Lincoln
to a Lincoln penny

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to Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan
to "Plan 9" to nine lives:

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it's all the same.

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(Laughter)

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But 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
or spiraling up a column

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or just straight left to right,

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or even going in a backwards zigzag
across those 88 accordion-folded pages,

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the same thing is happening;

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that is, that the basic idea
that as you move through space

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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, OK, well, if that's true,

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is there any way,
when we go beyond today's print,

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to somehow bring that back?

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Now, the monitor 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 propose,

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that perhaps we could create
these comics on an infinite canvas,

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along the X axis and the Y axis

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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.

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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 Jasen 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
that are durable,

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

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That's that entire comic you just saw,
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; it will adapt.

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It will adapt to its environment;
it's a durable mutation.

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Here's another one.

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This is by Drew Weing; this is called

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"'Pup' Ponders 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
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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[Cat 1: Pup! Earth to Pup!
Cat 2: Come play baseball with us!]

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(Laughter)

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00:15:18,252 --> 00:15:19,852
[Pup: Did either of you realize

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that eventually the universe
will be nothing but a thin, cold gas

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spread across infinite, lonely space?]

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[Cat 1: Oh ...
Cat 2: We'd better hurry, then!]

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00:15:27,825 --> 00:15:29,825
(Laughter)

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00:15:31,517 --> 00:15:32,667
Just one more.

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00:15:35,144 --> 00:15:37,089
Talk about your infinite canvas.

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00:15:37,113 --> 00:15:39,900
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
and eventually, virtual reality,

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or something equivalent to it,
some sort of immersive display,

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is going to provide us
with our most efficient escape

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from the world that we're in.

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

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But media provides us with a window
back into the world 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 comics cubed,

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you're looking at comics
that are more comics-like

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than they've ever been before --

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when that happens, you provide
people with multiple ways

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of reentering the world
through different windows.

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

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and see its shape.

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That's why I think this is important.

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00:16:42,334 --> 00:16:44,389
One of many reasons,
but I've got to go now.

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00:16:44,413 --> 00:16:45,563
Thank you for having me.