April '26

Across the four sessions of April 2026, the Future Text Lab circled a persistent and sharpening question: what, precisely, would compel someone to put on a headset and do serious knowledge work? The month opened with Frode Hegland's "Best of Both Worlds" presentation on foldable knowledge nodes in visionOS and progressed through a framework distinguishing "core" reading/writing space from "contextual" spatial surrounds, a confrontation with the Engelbart-scale question of whether the group is stuck designing mice without knowing what the mouse is for, and a concluding examination of document ownership, citation infrastructure, and the potential of ePub as a future scholarly container. A new participant, Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project, introduced the theme of embodiment and manual skill in relation to digital abstraction. Throughout the month, generative writing — writing to discover rather than to transcribe — served as the conceptual spine connecting flat-screen authoring, spatial interaction, and AI-assisted research.