Dana Paxson has worked at the coalface of the IT industry for 49 years. His career has spanned mainframes in the 60s, reading octal numbers in the 70s and building the BT phone directory in the 80s. For the last 20 years he has married his software skills with a love of sci-fi to invent a whole new, fully immersive story experience incorporating audio, visual and text. The final stage is a physical memory stick that delivers the whole lot direct to your desktop. The only stumbling block could be a publishing industry that craves the “next”, not the “new”… and simply isn’t ready for innovation.
For the next 33 years Cheval collected stones during the day, then at night, alone by oil light, he used them to construct Le Palais idéal. This was a man who had left school at 13, had no formal training yet through an overarching vision and compulsive industriousness he created a work of art so magnificent it inspired Picasso. Fashioned with his bare hands, the building was 78 metres round the perimeter and shimmered with 1,000 intricate miniature sculptures including a medieval castle, a Swiss chalet, crocodiles, deer, pelicans and sheep. His vision was so all encompassing he even festooned the walls with poems and verse inscriptions.
The level of creativity and industry to produce something like this sends your mind spinning. Gazing up at this outstanding achievement, it is virtually impossible to believe that it is the work of just one man. The finished result is so overwhelming that if you’d stumbled on the site say, five years’ into the build, you’d probably have shrugged your shoulders in incomprehension and moved on. And this is precisely the problem facing visionaries and outsider artists the world over… it is all just a bit too much to take in.
The problem is Paxson has experienced the computer revolution first hand. Extremely complex coding which would leave most people gasping for breath is his bread and butter. He has experienced the coalface of innovation over five decades and still appears to sit at the crest of very geeky wave.
His career in IT began in 1964 with Mainframes. For nine years he worked for Xerox Corporation in New York where he did systems work: “If you can picture a stack of paper about eight inches high,” he says “the old fashioned printer paper, filled with nothing but octal numbers. I was the specialist who used to go reading those things as though they were text. I could digest the information, find out what was wrong with the computer, and why it had crashed.” After that Paxson moved to Computer Consoles, the organisation which wrote and delivered the big system behind British Telecom’s directory assistance in the 1980s. And then when the company was bought by Nortel he got into spreadsheets… the building block of his Magnum Opus.
Dana Paxson may not be the person who gets in here first. His story may not be the immersive world that people choose to throw themselves into. There could well be someone else who has spent their life quietly creating and will pip him to the post at the last hurdle. I have not chucked myself into his work, have never really been a fan of sci-fi and would not like to pass comment on the actual story. However, one thing is clear; his is exactly the sort of visionary thinking that drives change. And the main stumbling block could well be a publishing industry, which for all its grudging embrace of the eBook, is fundamentally reactionary, because the talk is always about “the next” and never “the new”.
Yet all the ducks are lined up for digital publishing and I believe the next big new idea is waiting to emerge. This could be an inventive IT platform which takes users on a seamless journey into the heart of a narrative story like Paxson’s invention. Or it could be a more community-led creation, which utilises digital technology, gaming and film techniques to present a fully theatrical experience; offering poetry, song and dance in a similar vein to interactive theatre companies like Punchdrunk or Kneehigh. Whatever it is though, one thing is certain… when something new does get picked up and when it truly resonates, the ripples will last far beyond the lifespan of the creator.
Nearly 100 years ago Ferdinand Cheval dreamed of being buried at the heart of his building "like the pharaohs". Yet when this wish was vetoed by the authorities, he was undeterred and set to work on a tomb in the village cemetery in the same style as his palace. He died aged 88, about a year after the building was complete. And today his great monument is regarded as one of the best examples of outsider art in the world.