5

It’s 2014 and we’ve arrived in an interesting place: everything is digital. The old dualisms of digital/analog and material/virtual are null and void. The digitization of everything preceding this era is well underway or already complete. To be looking for something that’s purely “analogue", something with no influence of computational efforts, is like looking for a unicorn, that as we all know do exist, but are very rare. This is the new normal, we call this the post-digital age. Surely we have not arrived here having solved all prior problems, but aren’t we all excited to also solve any new difficulties this creates? 

Ewelina Aleksandrowicz and Andrzej Wojtas Metaballs indicate a new specific issue of these times: how do we differentiate post-digital aesthetic experiences and our ambivalent physical relation to them? Contemporary computer interfaces seemingly allow us to touch everything, but any approach stops at the invisible barrier of the screen. Tangible interfaces are still mostly media lab vapor ware and they solely aim at replacing the sensorial system with which we read concrete information. Pussykrew's Metaballs allow us to imagine that, at least very briefly, not only touching the surreal surfaces of these objects is within our reach, but that we also can wrap our arms around these shapes created by freezing a particular moment of a digital fluid simulation. They casually introduce a new dichotomy to differentiate objects and our experiences with them in the post digital age: they allow us to imagine that a streamable experience is now a grabbable object of our desire for aesthetic experiences.