“I’ve got a time-bomb in my ass”. Character who uttered this was neither terrorist nor high grade drug smuggler, butt a friend in last night’s dream. Hopefully it’s a phrase which will make it’s way into common usage, suitable both for sign posting a sense of urgency and referring to the genetic decay we all bow to in the end. It was so funny to hear last night it woke me clean up, laughing out loud. This week then: dream machines.

So Tha Story Goes
One Brion Gysin was travelling in a bus to Marseilles, circa 1958, when he passed a long row of trees and closed his eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind his eyelids: ‘a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space’.

You Spin Me Round
From here the effects of strobing light were researched and a simple flicker machine was constructed: a slotted cardboard cylinder which turned on a gramophone at 78rpm with a light bulb inside it. Again the kaleidoscopic visions returned, and this time ot was found after extended usage, perception of the world around had increased very notably, and all conceptions of being ‘dragged or tired had dropped away’.

Repetitive Light
What seems to be happening is of course, that the constant rotation and repetition of the light source in a dream machine, promotes and regulates the production of electrical brainwaves, in particular ‘alpha waves’, through the rhythmical stimulation of the optic nerve and visual cortex. Alpha waves are associated with a state of relaxed wakefulness, of receptivity without concentration, and have a frequency of between 8 and 13 cycles per second.

DIY Zen turntables
You’ll need a record player that does 78rpm, a globe and a cardboard design which you’ll find at google.com. Bear in mind this ain’t no pokemon epilepsy triggerin type scenario, just potentially a nice way to relax, a nice party gimmick, or if u believe the mystical hype: an opening to a sea of inner visions and transcendental experience which will forever change your life and you got it all from a free street press you picked up from beside a softdrink machine.

The Wait There’s More Dept..
Oh what a dream machine is a cluster bomb. Cluster bombs are bombs that contain many smaller bomblets designed to saturate a wide area. Each bomblet contains metal shrapnel designed for maximum human casualties and equipment damage. a typical cluster bomb would weigh 500 pounds and carry 247 bomblets. Unfortunately as with all detonation devices, the fuses are not 100 percent effective. There are always bomblets left unexploded. The current US variety are bright yellow and the size of a large can off food. The current food aid packages being dropped for displaced Afghans are painted the same colour to make them easy to find. Don’t worry about the children though, the US military are dropping fliers with every bombing raid to explain the differences. And there’s music in the next paragraph.

Underwater Trumpets
Androids may dream of electric sheep, but they listen to underwater trumpets. Hopefully there were plenty of androids in attendance at a recent Rephlex Records night in London where Pierre Bastien amazed the crowd with his mechano percussive beats and underwater mini-trumpet playing. It’s no wonder London attracts so many androids, what with a recent Stockhausen festival and the extraordinary surround sound system playback of many of the early works of this pioneering composer. His show was introduced by the man himself in an unforgettable white safari suit, and followed by the padded sounds of an Aphex Twin gig where all wandered around wearing wireless headphones in silence.

ciao bunnies!

Sidebars:
www.google.com
Here you’ll find easy to replicate designs for your own dreammachine – using the keywords ‘dream machine’ , ‘brion gysin’ and ‘flicker’.

www.strangereports.com
Choose a topic from the left hand column, and answer a few questions… voila! A realistic web site is created with a great selection of fake news stories using the names of your
friends! Try it, they fall for it (for a minute) every time!

www.indymedia.org
Great reading for cluster bomb fans and others interested in multi-perspectives on the terrorism being perpratrated by both the US & its attackers.

Concept is this: get enough people to aim their toy red laser pointers, at the same time, at the moon, and see if together, they can paint it red. Thanks to modern web technology, ideas like this can get the audience they deserve. Yes, it’s real, and yes it’s from the states. The brains behind this particular venture belong to one Jim Downey, a writer who hopefully appreciates just how many 3D readers own red laser pointers.

Were your eyes popping out of your head at a rave when you thought of this, or is there some other explanation?
No artificial stimulus involved. I’m naturally like this. It frightens my friends a little… but they seldom get bored around me.

How many people do you think participated in your first moon attempt?
Hard to say. I had about 100,000 hits to my website that weekend, with a LOT of press attention worldwide leading up to it. Directly, I heard from about 300 people who wrote to tell me they participated, almost all of them with friends. So, the number was at least in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands or more.

What sort of feedback did u get from that attempt?
Almost everyone who wrote me said that they enjoyed it. Most folks had a little party (I had about 60 people at my business), then went out to give it a try. The most common theme was that they enjoyed doing something a little crazy at the same time as everyone else, which was my goal: a shared dream.

Heard about any other weird group laser projects since you’ve started?
A lot of people have suggested doing something like lighting up the Statue of Liberty, that sort of thing. But no one has yet organized such an activity to my knowledge.

Some of the scientific reactions to your idea?
Almost without exception they say it won’t work, but most of them find it charming and say they are going to participate nonetheless. Real scientists understand the need for this kind of intellectual play, of daring to imagine things outside the accepted bounds. I find it refreshing that they and artists have so much in common in this regard.

What motivates you to try it in the face of this?
Because the technical aspect is only a small part of the conceptual project. The whole thing is more about human hopes and dreams than it is about photons.

What are the main obstacles to painting the moon red?
Let’s see…the power of the little laser pointers…atmospheric absorbtion and disturbance… the reflectivity of the lunar surface…the glare coming off the lit portion of the moon…and aiming the little things. Yeah, I think those are the main obstacles…

Have you factored in that the man on the moon might be wearing reflective sunglasses?
Be cool if he was, it’d help the light get back to us better.

What’s next if you succeed?
No idea what’s next – whatever happens. Hell, 7 months ago I didn’t know I was going to be doing this. We’ll just have to see what odd and wonderful ideas pop into my head, and which ones strike my fancy. You can’t force creativity, and usually you can’t even control it. You just gotta roll with it, take it where it leads you.

Sidebars:
www.paintthemoon.org
Join in the world’s largest collaborative work of art, or at least learn a bit more about the physics of painting the moon red.

http://isaac.exploratorium.edu/~pauld/Skateboard/ollie_physics.html
If it’s physics yer after, check this and you’ll understand finally how skateboarders manage to leap over poodles, up gutters, and onto spiral staircased handrails.

www.givewater.org
Thames Water (UK) has set up a website associated with Water Aid – and if 2 million people click on it, they’ll donate 150,000 to provide safe drinking water in Africa and Asia for 10,000 people. Only a few weeks left and 250,000 more clicks are still required to meet the target.

Hypnotism and jellyfish have more in common than most people realise. Discovered this being recently seduced by a sunset snorkel, but my freewill(y) knew it was surface time when I was overwhelmed with desire for a cheesecake seeming to bob in the waters ahead of me. Swim, swim, but not too fast or your lungs will pop like a batman caption. And who better to talk about the surface of comics, than Diana Ward founder of Melbournes’ Digital Media Collective who produced the most excellent C.Run seedy-rom? Jean Poole takes up the bait.

What inspired the Digital Media Collective?
We were all friends and doing different multimedia art projects around each other. I guess it seemed like a natural progression to band together and all contribute to one common outcome. We had big plans for a new breed of comics that could be more involved and multilayered than just something that was printed.

Why self produce digital comic compilation rather than turn to artworld for funding?
We spent about 2 months looking into the grant thing and writing proposals and statements of purpose and so on and we looked into heaps of funding bodies and what their criteria was. We actually came to the conclusion that there weren’t any funding organisations out there that were willing to fund a collective in the way in which we operated. We decided that trying to bend over backwards and change what we were on about to please the arts funding people would just end up bastardising our work. We eventually decided that the best way to say what we wanted to say in the way we wanted to say it, was simply to try and get the money together ourselves.

How well does digital media tie together your different creative interests?
I only really began to be interested in computers when drawing and design programs became common and easy to use. I have been cartooning since I was small, as well as producing electronic music. I guess digital media ties them all in very well. I use a wacom tablet so now I just draw straight into the computer. Since working with digital media I have got heaps more into animation, because there are so many tools out there for animators, it is the obvious next step.

What do screen based comics have going for / against them?
Well I guess when you get right down to it, it’s the content that is important and the medium could be anything. Screen based comics allow for more elements to be incorporated into the mix, like sound, animation and interactivity. For the web the advantages are more about ease of delivery- you bypass all of the bullshit involved in looking for a publisher, distributer and so forth. If people know where you are on the web, you have the ability to reach a huge global audience.

Against the screen based delivery is the fact that I think people like to have something tangible to hold and own. It’s instant satisfaction, opposed to all the various drawbacks from computer hardware such as memory issues, download speeds, compatible systems and all that. Also you actually have to own a computer, or have access to one, to be able to view the work, which is a big financial issue for many people.

How has C.Run been received?
We’ve had great responses so far. We are actually planning a second run pretty soon.

How do you think the surge in digital media has benefited the arts community?
I believe it is just art evolving. Art is always evolving and new movements are born and growing. It’s just art catching up with technology or technology catching up with art.

Do u think the popularity of South Park, The Simpsons & Flash technology has opened up animation possibilities for comic makers?
Definitely. I think that heaps of comic makers out there aren’t concerned with making comics simply for “kids”. Shows like the Simpsons and SouthPark prove that comics and cartoons have much more of a universal appeal, and aren’t just restricted to the Saturday morning kids slot. I think that tools like flash have taken away a lot of the painful grunt work involved in animating. It has enabled someone with a modest budget and a computer to potentially create a show that can be received by a large audience.

Sidebars:
Digital Media Collective
www.netspace.net.au/~van/dmc
If you’re ever in this part of town, you’ll find acool collection of comics and animation by some of Melbournes best independent comic makers. Nice interfaces too, these kids know what’s goin on.

Electric Sheep
www.e-sheep.com
A wikkid collection of comics which explore digital terrain well, including a recently added ‘Apocamon’ series, looking at the apocalypse pokemon style.

Just So you Know…
http://tealdragon.net/humor/facts/facts.htm
More info to stuff in your mental filing cabinet for later. Did you know a jellyfish is 95% water, hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego, and Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn’t wear pants?

www.elefanttraks.com
Where the elefants regain their hitpoints. Browse through various mp3s, electronic art uploads and read about the latest elefant news.

www.piratetv.net

Like the erotic airbrushed art found under fibreglass skateboards of decades gone by, the humble computer game is finally getting the cultural recognition it deserves. Indeed as we roll into an increasingly mediatised world, Rebecca Cannon from Some Underground Machine in Melbourne, plans to fill a gallery with art inspired by the games people play on those plastic box calculating devices. (mo-info? rebecca.cannon@antimedia.net )

What attracted you to curate an art exhibition inspired by computer games?
I’m very interested in the evolution of culture, and in particular the way creativity responds to advances in tech. In the late 70’s to mid-80’s, we witnessed a technological revolution which allowed interactive game technologies to enter the home on a mass scale, and with it’s limitations came a whole new visual language, heavy in semiotics. This mode of entertainment, and the visual language which came with it – like all cultural phenonmena- had an immense impact on the creative development of a generation. I’m curating this exhibition to survey and document that impact. Twenty years after games entered the home, what have they done to the visual and conceptual styles of artists?

What works have X-cited u most?
WATAG by Rachel tempest and Julian Oliver. People in Western Australia get to upload their graffitti and attack a virtual representation of the Richmond train station. Victorian taggers have to sit back and watch while interstate crews take over their turf. “What remains of territory when it is carried over into the digital?”

Space Invader is a French Installation artist who has launched a global invasion. He sticks space-invaders on public walls in various cities. The space-invaders are permanently attached, and he doesn’t get anyone’s permission to do it. I admire the literal way he has followed through with the ideas fed to him in that early game. Space-Invaders themselves just keep on coming. Occasionally Invader, (the moniker he has taken) gets in trouble with the police. In a sense they are the game players; they get to shoot back.

Spookyville is a game which some Brisbane kids are building. They have put a lot of effort into the visual style, making it a freaky gothic house of horrors. They are experimenting with gameplay itself, avoiding violence as a motive for interaction. The luscious sound design instigates the play, as one must make environmental recordings to gain points. The final challenge is to mix the sounds down into a track inside the mad professor’s laboratory.

The challenges of electronic arts curation?
The easiest part is tracking down the work. Most people working with electronic media make sure they’re represented on the web. The problems arise when you want to start showing the work to the public. Computers, projectors etc are really expensive for short-term hire, and in a gallery context you end up needing a few of them. We’re fortunate to live in a country where the government values cultural output and does offer some grants for artists and exhibitions, but writing proposals can be a very bewildering and stressful process.

Your first computer game memory?
We had a commodore 64 when I was a kid, back before (really) floppy discs. So to load games, you had to do it by cassette tape. I remember playing a really simple game called TRAX, which was even simpler than PACMAN. It took an hour to load! Somehow the excitement of controlling the action on the screen made it worth it.

First photoshopped dream?
A collage of my friend Marnie looking femininely tough, with the top of an armaguard van ( those spunky numbers for helicopter-view ) running through her brain.

What X-cites about the potential for game-building today?
I think they can be put to really good educational use. Imagine studying chemical engineering or medicine by using a game where you were rewarded for the knowledge which you fed into it. You could use what you had learnt to prevent nuclear meltdowns caused by terrrorist aliens, or plaques caused by genetic mutations. It’d be more fun than rote-learning.

I’m also keen to see more feminine interpretations of gameplay. I have heard about some interesting and commercially viable alternatives to kill-thrill games. In Japan (of course) there is a big market for girls games, some of which involve social skills like conversing with game characters to gain points. These alternative styles of games lead me to another area I’m xcited about – the increasing application of narrative to games, where games can replace the mythological hunger we currently satiate with films.

What game inspired art are u working on?
NONE. please dont remind me!

What’s the motivation behind your lesbian vampire film?
Repressed desires.

Opinions on the X-Box?
I could rant but then I could just shout: Beware, corporations are smart. All submissions to the X-Box game art competition will be owned by microsoft – it’s in the fineprint somewhere.

Fave games at the mo?
Kill Osama Bin Laden, pacman, Oni and Half-life.

Sidebarz:

Rebecca’s fave gamey urls….
selectparks.net/watag.htm
www.space-invaders.com/
www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pyang/base/allyourbase.swf
www.newgrounds.com/portal/uploads/32000/32077KillBin_Laden.swf
www.netspace.net.au/~van/game.html
www.microslut.f2s.com
www.cinemarcade.com
spookyville.n3.net

On the seventh day God created e-commerce and you could smell the artists wince, peeling the scabs off old heartwounds, to try and do it again. Would art and money ever be happy? Designers – if you’ve ever felt confused waking hungover beside ethical responsibility, after a particularly good product launch, then jump into bed with Jean Poole and Josh from futurefarmers.com/theyrule.net for their breakfast discussion.

Explain the Future Farmers to your grandkids in 2050?
Futurefarmers is a small design company started by Amy Franceschini in 1995, oscillating around a small collective of people who work with her on various web, print and art projects.

Your party blurb for explaining what u do within that?
I do a lot of the programming on the flash side of things and help with 3D animation, although most design is done by Amy.

What won you a residency with the farmers, and any tips for budding Australian design prodigy wannabe farm-hands?
Send us your URLs. If we’re excited by somebodies work and we have time we usually start emailing the person. If we have the resources then we can offer them an internship.

What do you think about the increasing shift to software based artistry?
Yay, more media to scribble on! I think it’s great, and there is unique potential for new artistic investigations. As we become more familiar with the technology both the potentials and limitations of the media will be found, although the limitations of capitalism will be discovered more quickly than the limitations of this medium. Napster being an obvious example.

What media do you enjoy using? What software is interesting to you?
I like open source software. Though not everything that I want to do is easy to accomplish through what is available now. I enjoy using flash and ph because together they provide a powerful set of tools for making interactive information visualizations.

As the creator of ‘They Rule’, how do you reconcile Futurefarmers working with the likes of Levi’s, Nike, NEC and MSNBC?
They Rule is an interesting project, but the real task is helping to build a movement that has the confidence, size and will to end the madness of this profit driven system for good. I am involved in a socialist organization and spend much of my time helping out in this process.

For me the question is what can we do build a world in which decisions about what gets produced and how it is produced are decisions made by everyone democratically? At the moment these decisions are made by the market. Proponents of capitalism like to say that the market is driven by an invisible hand, well now that hand is so stained by blood it should be visible to everyone. It’s going to take more than a few clever websites to bring this beast down.

Futurefarmers is some of the least alienating work I could find. I hope that we’d draw the line at greenwashing, or nuclear power companies etc. On the whole I can have a more effective political voice through the united actions of a party than the singular withdrawal of my labour from the work on the website of a multi-national.

Web design seems to mesh the artistic and commercial spheres like never before. Is it eating or feeding the avant garde?
Nothing escapes the alienating force of commodification. We can make art that is reflexive about this, and we can make art which is didactic, but can we can’t make art which escapes this condition.

Net nostalgia laments the shoppingmallisation of cyberspace – what’s keepin’ it real 4u?
The real potential of the web, the ability to search all the text in the world for a certain string of text, to locate any piece of music, are hampered by private interests. The sites that I enjoy are those that try and resist this, or comment on it.

How do we avoid a cubicled future? (where we chew nasa vitamin pill hand me downs and data dripfeeds )
I think the we in the statement is the crucial term. The ‘we’ has to be as broad as possible. It can’t be an elite few intellectuals, nor for that matter a few well meaning ‘culture jammers’. The ‘we’ will have to be all those people and their neighbours, their children, their parents and their posties. etc. There is a growing confidence amongst everyday people in society that we can have some sort of say in how the world is run, and that it seems to be about time that we do.

An untouched area of design u’d like to X-plore?
I’d like to continue doing interaction design that involves people communicating with other people rather than them interacting with something I have made – chatroom like spaces that facilitate live communication probably themed around an issue.

A large client requests a 2 line proposal for a FutureFarmers genetic engineered artwork. Your ideas?
I don’t think it would be possible to do gentetically engineered artwork right now. I consider Kac’s rabbit to be a genetically engineered PR stunt. My reply would be:

Make a tree that grows US $100 bills, throw in some genes from some tenacious weeds, make it round-up ready; distribute this through the so called third world and poor areas. Include a terminator gene that kicks in after ten generations so that after the US economy collapses we aren’t swamped with the detritus of its ugly currency.

Josh & Bookmarx
I check www.commondreams.org almost everyday. I read www.socialistworker.org, www.indymedia.org, www.nologo.org, www.corpwatch.org and others for political content. I enjoy flazoom, blogdex, k10k, metafilter, www.ntk.net, www.blackbeltjones.com/work/ for my links…

www.theyrule.net
Exploring the increasingly concentrated and cross-connected ownership of wealth within multinational corporations with a range of interwoven flash pieces.

www.futurefarmers.com
Cute flash & plenny of it. Likely if you’ve read any contemporary design mags, u.v scene soma this work.

Electrofringe (Sep 27 – Oct 1 )
www.electrofringe.org
Open source software, copyright of the image, manipulating the web for fun and controversy, the influence of technological changes over ideas in design, how to break into the gaming industry, free workshops, forums, screenings,turntablism and much udder audiovisual experimentally ill stuff.

Nervously a 3D Woody Allen paces outside a polygon Sperm Bank. Polly is indeed gone, the nurse of his fantasies already gone home with his analyst. Virt.nature would soothe, but is hard to find in Virt.Manhattan. Mr.Allen clicks to Virt.Melb, coincidentally the locale of one Jon McCormack, who since 86 has been creating Electronic Gardens of Artificial Life, Self Generating Ecosystems, and acoustic and virtual environments that respond to weather conditions and audience responses. Jean Poole did the virt.handsake thing, and got this to keep:

How did you get involved with computer animation?
I started out studying mathematics, but I never really liked it until I discovered you could look at all those funny symbols in graphical form. You could actually see abstract symbols and relationships made visible / material through graphics technology. The next year I went to film school at Swinburne where they had computers that made animations. It was a revelation. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do, and since then I’ve been using computers for creative applications to explore the aesthetics of processes.

Where has animation gone since you’ve been playing with it?
It’s become much easier since I started (in the mid 1980’s). A lot of software people had to write in the early days is now incorporated into animation systems, but fundamentally they all work in the same way. However I find most of the modern animation packages very disappointing, because they operate under a very limited aesthetic, essentially trying to mimic reality, rather than looking at an expanded representation of what computers might offer.

What attracts you to artificial life and ecosystems?
I suppose it’s the way they can often have these kind of emergent properties, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. I like the way they can surprise you and behave in ways that you never planned or expected. I’m also attracted to adopting the “metaphor” of process-based systems, particularly living systems, since they are such a rich source of creativity.

How far has work in this area advanced?
Calling something “artificial life” is easy, but just because you call it life doesn’t mean that its really alive in any sensible sense. Many layers of complexity exist in the natural world that are ignored in a-life simulations, because computers can’t handle all that intricacy. It’s surprised me how few biologists want to get involved in core a-life research. Maybe b-life is already too much of a challenge. We are a long way off from even matching the real complexity of a single cell in any a-life simulations, so there is still a long way to go yet.

What are the major A-Iife debates at the moment?
Could any computer simulation ever genuinely be called “alive” (strong Alife) or only ever be a simulation (weak A-life)? I tend to think the latter. Another major debate (that extends to cognitive science and AI) is the internal representation of concepts and the embodiment of meaning, although not all A-life models specifically reference this problem.

Douglas Adams said we’ll grow artificial intelligence rather than design it – what do you think?
It’s easy to get carried away with the notion of “growing” and “evolving” almost anything, but this approach may only be suitable for a limited set of problems. The problem of “intelligence” is very complex and varied, and a number of milestone results in AI have been achieved without using evolutionary algorithms. Nonetheless, ideas like growing intelligence come from the fact that our own intelligence is in some sense grown; i.e. that we evolved from “less intelligent” species over millions of years and also that our own learning processes have much to do with our physicality in the world (most computers have very little in the way of physical experience).

What’s the relationship between technology and your creative process?
My main interests lie in how interactive, process-based models allow us to interpret and understand the world in new ways. Certainly recent technological advances in, for example, real-time 3D graphics, have advanced the possibilities for investigating these ideas.

What are your favourite pieces of software and why?
I guess with all modesty aside I’d say my own software is what I like using the best. Software is the implementation of ideas in a technology that is “perpendicular” to the brain. The two complement each other very well, if the software is implemented in the right way.

How has using technology shaped your art & thinking (good & bad)?
It has benefits and difficulties. I am very conscious of the “digital aesthetic” that limits most technological works, and that computers aren’t designed as “art machines”, and carry a lot of cultural limitations from the disiplines where they were born (e.g. military/industrial, science, engineering, “American Ideology” and so on).

What will you say to your waking software daughter?
I have enough trouble relating to my human one at the moment.

Sidebars:
Jon’s Life Online:
www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/main.html
Cheq tha electronic artworks, installations, videos, and wads of reading on generative modelling for electronic media, electronic sound synthesis, and music composition, organic modelling techniques for computer graphics and philosophical and cultural issues concerning Artificial Life and Artificial Nature. Good resource page too, with x-hibition, software, music and other links.

Jon’s Favourite Website:
www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
Jean’s clue: eoti = End of the Internet.

Create your own Herbivore
www.technosphere.org.uk
And then see how it survives this 3d environment, complete with email updates from your creature. My Datasperm, poor child, was killed by the predator ‘Jaws’, after much hunting for food and surviving other attacks.

In the central control tower, they’re beaming out skulls. Have you noticed? From pole posters to surfboard covers, every second fashion boutique window and the walking one shouldered, Oxford st tee-shirt brigade, the skull seeps into our day. Even saw a little boy scrawling a skull onto the side ova stopping bus yesterday, but he didn’t watch the rearview mirror. Or the busdriver putting on his Mexican wrestling mask before stepping outside with his baseball bat to the cheers of the bus-folk.

Why so many skulls? Why do people really want blood so bad? Apocalypse = now? I mean where do you really want to go today? Possible paths for this week’s text include: ‘CNN’, ‘fashion’, ‘Hitler’, ‘fighting terror with terror’, ‘skateboarding’, ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’ and ‘bus-boy narrative’. All this and you choose a combo: ‘skater ollieing the skull of hitler preserved in a jar’. Ok, ok – let’s X-plore the relationship between entertainment technologies and the ways we use them.

Mark Pesce likes toys. Founder of Virtual Reality Mark-Up Language (VRML) which allows you to wander the web in 3D, Mark’s latest book, This Playful World, charted the emerging possibilities and implications of home-grade media technology, particularly gaming tech.

More recently, Mark produced a feature-length film about ‘the Impending End of Everything’, titled ‘Becoming Transhuman’, where appropriated sound and video images are used to create a new work which expresses Mark’s deeply-held beliefs on the future of humanity.

Who are we? Where are we going? What will we become? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they are enthusiastically debated on Mark’s mailing list, nurtured to keep track of cutting-edge trends in the sciences. The sites are well worth a visit, maybe a bit too fractal-techno for some, but with much worth chewin nonetheless. And here’s Mark text-Live:

What was the most useful feedback on your book This Playful World?
A pointer to an inaccuracy I got from the President of Tiger Toys.

What are your current projects / involvements?
Working on a small software application, perhaps will be patented. It’s a utility. (I like to get my hands dirty every once in a while.) Writing a few essays. Have been contemplating another book, but nothing looks very interesting right now.

How has Sep-11 affected your perspective on empowerment through technology?
It’s confirmed my suspicion that the history of the 21st century will be a constant struggle between our incredibly extended abilities and the fact that these abilities are available to an ever-increasing range of people.

What computer games have impressed u lately + why?
“Black & White” is very impressive. We’ll see that kind of tech in a next generation of Furbys, as I predicted in my book. “Majestic” is also incredible, because it confuses the line between reality and fantasy in very promising ways…

What are the interesting issues in VR today?
I don’t think there are any. VR is about as dull & boring as its ever been, and practically no one working in the field has a clue how to make it interesting, relevant, or important.

What do you think of extropians who want to upload their consciousness to a computer?
I think that they’re being overly religous and not particularly rigorous in their scientific thinking.

3 devices the world needs today?
Devices that don’t yet exist? Let me know.

3 urls for a desert island?
classics.mit.edu – Internet Archive of Classical Literature
promo.net/pg/ – Project Gutenberg
www.britannica.com – Encyclopedia Britannica (as long as someone else pays for the subscription!)
(( note from six years later : Reckon Jimmy Wales might’ve sorted that one out. ))

sidebars:
www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce
Outside the Light Cone is Mark’s homepage, or as he describes, his: ‘space within the Noosphere’. Within it you’ll find most of his written works, rituals, lectures, papers, video interviews and links.

www.playfulworld.com
‘This Playful World’ is a “web-enhanced” book, meaning you’ll find a depth of additional resources here, such as research materials, links, articles and additional essays by the author, and a short promotional film which gives some background on The Playful World.

www.zap.to/textaqueen
Want to scrawl a skull on the side of a bus? You’ll need a fat texta, and texta art to guide you: try these portraits of emcees, deejays, performers, girls, ‘&’ texta scribblings by kids….