In other news, Nasa launches a tiny helicopter on Mars

I saw that Nasa launched a tiny helicopter on Mars this week. It got me thinking about dreams made into reality with tech, and primarily how it is time to make friends with tech as we go head-first, head strong into the phygital era. 

It should no longer be a badge of honour to be a self-proclaimed luddite or sigh and put your hands up as simply ‘bad with computers’, its time to get good. And naturally, theVOV is the perfect place to start. 

We aren’t here to take over the thrill that you get when you walk into a gallery and peer at an artwork with real people next to you. We are here to make better. We know we can never replicate the physical experience, so instead, we seek to gather the amazing parts of the digital realm and inject them into the physical. Whether you experience one of our 15 exhibitions this season in a gallery or at home, you are able to fly up and look at the top of one of Chris Burden’s magnolia lamps on theVOV. You can rediscover and go behind the scenes of an exhibition long taken down, like Hayward Gallery’s Andreas Gursky retrospective.

I often think about a historical rumour, or legend, I heard about, where upon the invention of the quill, people were up in arms, and full of worry that no one would speak to anyone anymore, they would only communicate on paper. And here we are speaking and writing. Whether this is actually historically accurate, I believe, is irrelevant. 

With the acceleration and constant evolution of tech, people worry about our lack of communication, physical touch, reliance and of course a collective spiralling mental health especially is lazily cast off as the fault of the huge umbrella term of ‘social media’. Things, naturally, are not so simple. 

Just like the invention of quill, with every invention, people worry about what we will lose. But my point is that actually there is no such thing as ‘losing’, as we gain far more than we lose, we just have to understand how, in this case, the digital and physical co-exist. The road may well be bumpy, but in the end you might just launch a helicopter on Mars.

with love, from Lottie @theVOV