Spaces of our Experience, by David Conover

As large HD flatscreens become more common, its frenzied media content is encroaching more and more into the rooms of our lives. I notice that very few people in the world of providing this media programming really take into account a few of the basic experiential qualities of these spaces. Anyone asking the simple question, for example, of what else is happening in these rooms?

For starters, what do people see and hear? Surely, we know the more common rectangles which can capture our attention: the television, the computer monitor, the fireplace, the skylight, the aquarium, the bulletin board, the fine art on the wall, the door and the window. The content within these respective frames flickers, heats, flies, swims, notifies, represents, grows, knocks, and walks on by. Sometimes the furniture is arranged around one of these more dominant rectangles, usually the ones that emit the brightest light with the most colors and the fastest refresh rate. As for sounds, people hear music, broadcast narrative, crackles, bubbles and hums, passing sirens or traffic or trains, planes overhead, and doorbells.

Such is the sensory landscape of the great and promised media convergence. No program is an island unto itself. A slow isolated island of experience, in fact, is hard to find and harder yet to sustain.

- David Conover