I have been more fortunate than most when it comes to traveling the world. When I was 6 years old my family circled the globe and spent a year living in India. As an adult I studied and worked for a year in Denmark, visiting all the Scandinavian countries and spending several weeks in Spain and Turkey.
As a young faculty member I developed and ran a study abroad program in Europe with bases of operation in Paris and Florence. I spent one summer in Costa Rica completing a masterplan for a campus in the cloud forest. As a researcher I traveled to Brazil and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province after working for several years in the squatter settlements of the Texas Mexico border. I have lived in Iowa, Chicago, Louisiana, Tucson, Las Vegas and Seattle. The great thing about travel is getting exposed to how other people live, their cultures and ecosystems — it is intoxicating. After experiencing so much I still have a few destinations on my bucket list, one being Iceland. Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic has put a bit of a damper on my desire to travel abroad. Who wants to spend time and treasure navigating complex protocols only to visit a country in lockdown or, worse, get stuck in quarantine? So this holiday my wife booked me a ticket for a digital travel experience.
My trip is located in an immersive IMAX-like theater on the Las Vegas Strip with haptic seating and is currently featuring a tour of Iceland.
I am excited and thankful for my gift but am a bit saddened thinking that this symbolizes a significant shift in our collective behavior. I want to experience the real thing, not a sanitized, condensed, curated spectacle that will undoubtably dull my satisfaction with our physical world. If it was just this experience I wouldn’t be so concerned. However, my last three art exhibitions — during the pandemic — have experienced a low number of physical visitations while experiencing an explosion of visitors via online virtual tours. It never occurred to me to develop a virtual tour of my exhibitions prior to Covid. My son came back from college this holiday with a VR headset and hand controllers. He is finishing up his degree in industrial design and is using the virtual reality environment/equipment to draw, create digital prototypes and models. Unless you have been living under a rock you have heard about the NFT craze as well as Facebook changing its name to META in preparation for our new digital reality. Nike has already acquired a digital company that designs and sells virtual footwear. It seems like our society’s transition to a digital existence is accelerating, and when you work and live in a digital world, your interest, concern and investment in our physical world – the world I want to live in — undoubtedly diminishes.