The Mirrorverse Is You
Hoverboards, Snoop Dogg, and insisting on place and memory
You have all you need
And we are hereBeverly Glenn-Copeland, In the Image
Several weeks ago, a former student of mine reached out to invite me to participate in a project he was working on. The project: a giant augmented reality game that he's building. My task would be to design a playable item for the game.
Mind you, saying "a former student" in this case is kind of like describing Rihanna as just a singer; it's true but…inadequate. This particular former student, Asad Malik, is the powerhouse CEO of a company called Jadu, and the Mirroverse Augmented Reality (AR) game world that his team is building is intended to be on the scale of the entire world. Imagine a more sophisticated version of Pokémon GO, but with avatars and objects that allow you to traverse through the entire world. (Incidentally, years ago I wrote an article for Quartz about how Pokémon GO couldn't be played everywhere in the world because of missing data. It'll be interesting to see if and how those same realities affect Jadu's Mirrorverse.)
There are five of us who have been asked to design specialty hoverboards that will enhance players' abilities to navigate the forthcoming game world. I can say with absolute certainty that of a group composed of Snoop Dogg, Grimes, (Sir) Lewis Hamilton, and crypto-art curator Trippy, I'm definitely the most famous one. Oh wait, I meant least famous. I can't speak to why the celebrities are participating in the project, though it might be connected to the fact that Jadu is dropping these hoverboards as NFTs that folks can buy ahead of the game's launch.1
My own participation is tied to pure intrigue at getting to create an item that will affect how people experience space in an AR world. I love making new things, and the fact that my practice focuses a lot on the conceptual shouldn't overshadow the emphasis I place on aesthetics and visual meaning. I've really enjoyed coming up with a design for my hoverboard. The end result draws upon traditional Northern Nigerian indigo dying patterns.2 The hoverboard was just debuted a couple of days ago and it looks, if I can say so myself, very cool.
I also see this project as a chance for an intervention. If you've stumbled upon any article about the tech world in the last six months, you've likely heard about the metaverse, the next generation of the Internet that just about every major tech company is feverishly lighting candles over and investing billions into manifesting.
The dream of the metaverse relies on building an even more expansive version of the Internet that sucks in more of our bodies (through hardware like glasses and helmets) and our attention (through avatars that will be used to buy goods, conduct work, consume entertainment, and of course get spammed with ads through) in an interoperable way (your avatar would, supposedly, persist across different company platforms).3 In being an AR game, Jadu's Mirrorverse engages with some of the same logic as the metaverse, though it isn't nearly as expansive and far more thoughtful than Mark Zuckerberg's fantasies.
That question of thoughtfulness is important. From the metaverse to the tech billionaire race to market commercial space flights, major players in tech seem to love the idea of finding a new world that's devoid of all the complications of the existing one. Early Internet adopters were seduced by the same fiction, the tantalizing idea that a supposed "new frontier" means that everything can be rewritten to benefit the author.
I wish that these heavy hitters would learn the biggest lesson: to every new place you go you still bring you. You, with all of your assumptions and privileges and ways of doing things. There is no tabula rasa here. The new world we crave will have to come from us, but it will have to include many more of us.
I spoke earlier about my hoverboard's design, but I'm not quite yet at liberty to discuss the fact that the board will affect gameplay as well. What I will say is this: the board I've designed has some secret additional functionality built into it, functionality that ever-so-subtly undoes the myth of a smooth frontier. There's an additional layer of an ongoing art work wrapped up in the game play item I’ve designed, something to be experienced only by the players who have the board. My goal has always been to use the piece as a way to insert a sloppy sense of place into the game.4
I want the mess, as always. What comes to mind when I think about the metaverse is this: Where are you when you return? When you set your phone down, when you take off the headset, what is the thing — the feeling, the sensation, the knowledge, the thing — that remains?
The game doesn't come out for a long time, so there wont be answers to those questions for awhile. But we should pay attention when there are. Puns aside, there’s a lot riding on them.
TBH, I do find it amusing that through this project I’ve somehow become a tangential NFT artist through no real effort of my own.
Indigo is one of the most patently global and intensely local plants I can think of, a plant grown all over the world (in Haiti, Japan, Peru, Mexico, Nigeria, and India, and other regions) that is deeply embedded in even more cultures. Nearly every region had its own tradition for when it comes to using it as dye. I'm especially drawn to dyeing practices from Kano, Nigeria, which result in cloths that are so lovely. Though European colonialism brought an ugly turn to the plant by converting it into cash crop, it was only through the knowledge of enslaved folks that it was able to be grown and used in the Americas. It's a plant that has always been many things, a clear reminder of the ways that place, time, pain, and beauty have been entangled but how no one of those things invalidates the others.
For what it’s worth, consistently on-top-of-the-now tech reporter Casey Newton has explained that the vision may be present, but the tech for the metaverse is not here by a long shot.
I publish this on the day after the inimitable bell hooks has passed. bell hooks was thinker whose words seemed to float throughout so much of my work, and on this sad day I feel indebted her assertions in Belonging: A Culture of Place: a sense of place is always tied to history and memory, and for so many of us — especially Black folks — memory has always been a site of resistance.