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What does the future feel like? Forget what it looks like: how do you grasp it? What does it feel like in the palm of your hand, in the tips of your fingers. Think about switches, dials, and keyboards made of nothing but light. Forget the horizons, think about the UI of tomorrow.I have come close to this future, I think. I encounter it most mornings when I'm scrolling Instagram and I come across Michael Murdock. You know Instagram: mine's mostly the artful crumbs, foams and airs of modern food, along with sweet natured, gormless doggoes and the occasional brutal intrusion by Mrs_Angemi, a pathologist from New Jersey who likes to take pictures of the awful, beautiful, vivid things she encounters at work in order to educate her followers.
Michael Murdock's a bit different: His Circular Logic Board offers a lime-coloured cube that appears to have the consistency of jelly, making the pins set within it shimmy back and forth on the stiff tides. His Primary Cortex Buffer is something you might hold in your hand. Maybe you would grasp the glowing trackball at the bottom and see the gradients shift on the landscape pane above it as you scanned alien worlds. I'm not sure what you'd do with his Quantum Resonance Module, a globe that radiates sharp little arrows, but I do know you wouldn't want to sit on it. Most days it is like this, anyway. No cakes or cute animals from this guy: instead Murdock gifts me a magical thing that looks useful while also suggesting that it might be, like, completely radioactive.
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