Just returned from a lovely cruise vacation, during which I enjoyed several meditations using Alistair’s recordings. As I wrapped one session on my stateroom balcony, I found myself immersed in a kind of metaphor for “the big open,” FWIW … I was the cruise ship — an intricate structure of compartmentalized preferences, ideas, thoughts, and a hull loaded with the ballast of my own archived experiences — sailing the waterways of the world. In the evenings, the ship’s lights begin glowing, creating a halo on the sea around the waterline — the fifth field, illuminating all that stuff and providing perspective on it from without. But I also found myself far out in the sea — in the actual big open — watching the ship gliding by, flowing with the flow, doing its thing ... and I felt immeasurably happy seeing it chug along on its way. The USS or HMS Beingfulness? 😁

Near the end of today’s always-lovely Beingfulness session, Narit brought up the Queen’s recent “hologram” carriage, asking a wonderfully valid question of it: “I mean, what is that?” I have some answers — too many, in fact; I just completed a PhD dissertation on that very technological subject! — and I refrained from jumping in for fear of babbling on and hijacking the enjoyable chat. Forgive the ego trip, but for anyone interested in one nerd's thinking through the emerging quandary of digital holograms — how they mess with and/or enhance ways we make sense of reality, and my own claims about how they boost embodiment within the social experience of any modern media (which inherently create liminal spaces between presence and absence in which we “communicate” but, more in this case, really commune) — I offer some light bedside reading … An essay of mine, “Will holograms help us grieve?” An article of mine based on research at the Univ. of Westminster (nee the Royal Polytechnic Institution), "Pepper’s Ghost and the Augmented Reality of Modernity" (PDF below, with the usual caveats about academese) My very occasional blog, with several posts about recent holograms of deceased pop stars There are likely related discussions to be had about this community's own experiences Zooming with Alistair & Daniel et al., the ways the online platform (and this site) has facilitated so much more than linguistic & intellectual communication, and the virtual space between presence and absence we find & occupy together, literally/figuratively/liminally/magically etc.