GUEST EDITORIAL
Braindance editors have long strived to strike a balance between real, lived experience and technological, experiential purity. The more heavily processed the material, the more abstracted the pathways, the clearer the braindance recording; these fundamental elements of design have guided editors since the first wave of brain-to-brain experience sharing technology took hold. In their pursuit of balance, however, editors have clearly shown a bias for purity over naturalism over the years, even going so far to use it as a point of pride in the quality of their production.
But in the industry's latest push for greater purity has the purpose of the technology already been forgotten? Will we not find ourselves processing and filtering a braindance recording to the point that the emotional experience no longer extends beyond what we receive from film, television and video games? After reliving some of the latest titles on my feeder unit, this once-academic question now feels all too inevitable with the industry's current trajectory.
For a moment, let's consider why some reports suggest more and more users are searching for unlicensed titles on the black market (so-called black braindances, extreme braindances, or XBDs). Are we so sure it's the illicit content they are after? Or maybe the real draw is the residual "grit" we editors try so hard to remove? Distracting thoughts, irrelevant memories, loose associative threads, emotions stretching beyond the desired spectrum... What if this "noise" is not so superfluous as we believe it to be? What if these peripheral experiences hold the potential to elevate a good braindance to an exquisite one? We do ourselves a disservice by not exploring these questions before our blind crusade for braindance purity leads this industry straight into the bin of obsolete, flash-in-the-pan technology.
– J.A.
Relive.it – The quarterly magazine for braindance editors, amateurs, and enthusiasts, vol. 4/78, December 2076
