The theme of Ribbonfarm‘s annual Refactor Camp is Escaping Reality. Inspired to make the trek from Central Time to California, the first day alone made the trip worthwhile. After a Friday night dinner with three other attendees (that included discussions of autonomous, spatially unconstrained living and Horcrux-crypto security), Saturday kept hitting resonant long-notes with effects akin to coffee naps[1].
To start with, I checked in with the conference’s founding father (Venkatesh Rao) and he handed me the book referenced in this article’s first footnote (Reality Hunger, by David Shields) to initiate a crowd-sourced labeling of the interesting snippets of the book. I chose a passage in the Genre chapter, and was reconsidering the book’s place on my Audible wish list in favor of a physical copy to fit the staccato-aphorism writing style as I passed it along to another Camper.
Sarah Perry kicked off the day’s talks with a keynote on How to See Voids. The “void” Wikipedia page shows off the malleability of the concept, and Sarah puts voids-as-useful-patterns through a 60 minute round of failure testing. Seeing voids requires looking for the lack of things, rather than looking for things. Paying attention to the gaps between stars or between cars instead of the stars or cars themselves. The patterns to be found in the space between inform the way we ingest coincidences as narrative significance (Jean-Louis Dessalles added to the reading list). Voids also went to work as an individual’s future projection option-space. The future’s blankness enables a painting of any number of possibilities on the void-canvas.
The development of the internet expanded the total volume of voidspace available to people, beyond geography, paper, and individual minds, bringing forth tools for developing new voids, in addition to the traditional task of void-filling. Sarah asserts that voids are both traps and the means to escape traps, providing humans with the power to craft positive blank spaces and journey into them. Social influencers create new voids (Minecraft, Refactor Camp, Kardashianism).
It was ambitious to conceive that 20 pages of notes could be converted into playfully hyperlinked writing within an hour (with cold brew and a seed cookie as distractions). Heading back to Philosophie for Refactor Camp Day 2 now, adding “Part 1” to this post’s title.
[1] If you’re tired of links and references to obscure, abstract, or confusing concepts, maybe retreat back to the confines of reality before we complete our escape.
Roman Ryan 