opportunity
to topple the storytellers who had dominated our politics, economics,
society and religion - in short our very reality - and to replace
their stories with those of our own. It was a beautiful and exciting
sentiment, but one as based in a particular narrative as any other.
Revolutions simply replace one story with another. The capitalist
narrative is replaced by that of the communist; the religious
fundamentalist's replaced by the gnostic's. The means may be
different, but the rewards are the same. So is the exclusivity of
their distribution. That's why they're called revolutions - we're just
going in a circle.

This is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of
interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we
have the ability to step out of the story altogether. Renaissances are
historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. People in a
variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability
to reframe their reality. Renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. It is
the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. A renaissance is a
dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our
understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence
changes. The stories we have been using no longer work.

Take a look back at what we think of as the original Renaissance; the
one we were taught in school. What were the main leaps in perspective?
One example is the use of perspective in painting. Artists developed
the technique of the vanishing point and with it the ability to paint
three-dimensional representations on two-dimensional surfaces. The
character of this innovation is subtle but distinct. It is not a
technique for working in three dimensions; it is not that artists
moved from working on canvas to working with clay. Rather, perspective
painting allows an artist to relate between dimensions: representing
three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane.

Another example is calculus, another key renaissance invention.
Calculus is a mathematical system that allows us to derive one
dimension from another. It is a way of describing curves with the
language of lines, and spheres with the language of curves. The leap
from arithmetic to calculus was not just a leap in our ability to work
with higher dimensional objects, but a leap in our ability to relate
the objects of one dimension to the objects of another. It was a shift
in