If I had to name the preeminent art form of the pre-informational era, I would go with architecture. It is at once the most durable, representative, and comprehensive of our available artistic utterances. Buildings embody our most profound, ambitious, and capital-intensive attempts to overhaul the conditions of existence.

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Now if I were to go out on a not-so-daring limb and predict the preeminent medium of the new age that we are just now in the process of bringing about, I would say, without a hesitation, that the great art of the future will be the data structure. Like a good stone monument, the data structure lays claim to comprehensiveness, sweeping all the other arts up into its compass.

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Here, then, is the motive of worldwide digitization: to render every impulse, whether aesthetic or utilitarian, in the same, fully-transformable panglossary. And like architecture, the target medium of this world-wide conversion blurs the line between representing and being. 

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Now you see how you might begin to be in real trouble. You could get lost here, really hurt, although none of the traces of these lives can impact yours. You could give this playground more interest, more engagement, more zeal than you have ever given your own existence. 

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And then, in time, another sadness sets in. The sadness of consummation. The sadness of infinite freedom. Of save and reboot. Of having the world, in all its heft and bruise and particularity, go utterly your own way.

We dream that a new tool might put us closer to the thing that we are sure lies just beyond us, just outside the scale of our being.

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Now more than ever, the world is too much with us. Late-day commodity capitalism depends on making sure that we are never alone, never away from the world image, never out of ear- or eyeshot, never outside the flood of signals that stand in for the source that they are signaling. To turn arts time-honored trick and subvert this comfort, I suggest that new media look, for a model, to that last act performed in solitude that consensual society doesnt yet consider pathological.

Our technologies are the congealed projections of our hopes and fears. Like our art, they are the engrams of our unwillingness to live in any place that would treat us the way this place does. And like our preeminent arts—like building, like architecture—our new techs strive to remake the world in our own image, to re-form, through re-presenting, the place we recognize but cannot yet find. The data structure transports that old battle of building to the true locus of our discontent: the restless, reified image of the outside that we carry around in our own mental spaces.

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From the beginning, part of us has always sought to assemble the cathedral that would rise without material constraints.

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No change in medium will ever change the nature of mediation. A world depicted with increasing technical leverage remains a depiction, as much about its depicters as about the recalcitrant world. We shape the data that we aspire to live in. But the place that we make will stay at best a running approximation, a long act of iterated guess, of near-miss metaphor, of like-thisness. The course of technology, like the course of information, like the course of art, which it always informs, takes as its sole available topic people talking to one another, revising, revisiting, re-presenting, re-presenting this open conversation, this short glimpse of long time, our condition of hindered need and standing bewilderment. Our answer to thats all.