Realtalk

Bret Victor’s group tries to build a new Computational Medium. To get there is less a question of a sudden eureka, but more a permanent and stubborn process of pushing beyond what is thinkable now. The lab takes existing technologies such as projectors, cameras, lasers, whiteboards, computers, and Go stones, and recombines them with new or historic ideas about programming paradigms, system design and information design, as well as a range of assumptions and visions about cognition, communication, sociality, politics and media. The group is constructing a series of operating systems for a spatial dynamic medium, each building on the experiences of building the last one, and each taking roughly two years to build. The current OS is named “Realtalk” and its predecessor was called “Hypercard in the World” (both names pay respect to historical, heterodox programming environments: Smalltalk in the 1970s and Hypercard in the 1980s). While the group develops such operating systems, it engages in a process of writing and rewriting code, as well as manifestos, lots of talking, even more moments of collective silence, of iterating and tweaking mantras, of digesting films and books, as well as huge amounts of technical papers, and building dozens—indeed hundreds—of hardware and software prototypes.

BACHMANN, Götz, 2017. Utopian hacks. limn. 2017. Vol. 1, no. 8. pdf [Accessed 4 September 2024]. page

See "Realtalk in practice" page , pdf

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