Only Hands-On Computing Changes Who Gets to Build

His flight home was delayed, so a venture investor stepped into Mercer Labs, an art and technology museum near the World Trade Center. Inside were 26 projectors and audio that traveled around the gallery while the walls seemed to melt away. The visit transported him and clarified something.

He presents the museum as the opposite of the workshop he had just left. He puts it this way: “Mercer is the consumption version of this future: you stand inside someone else’s computation and watch.”

The workshop in Brooklyn held Folk Computer, built by researchers Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, who had previously worked at Dynamicland, the Oakland lab started by Bret Victor. Overhead cameras keep track of tagged paper sheets that act as programs, and projectors show the results on the tables and walls around them, using locations in the room instead of points on a screen. As he describes it, “The computer is the room.”

Rizwan, one of its makers, handed him a paper program and set it down for the table to run. He attached a keyboard, typed a line of code, saved, and the sheet glowed green. After he detached the keyboard, the program continued to glow where it lay. Nearby, the investor drew a bunny one frame at a time and saw it begin to move. Then he and Rizwan made music by laying down cards between them, each card a track. He heard himself say, “I don’t need the monitor anymore.”

He calls it the most human programming he has ever done, programming with his whole body alongside another person, with, in his words, “almost no distance between the idea and the thing.”

Only the version with the marker changes who gets to build. His phrase for Brooklyn is “you pick up a marker and the room becomes yours.”