Open Transcripts

Forbidden Research Welcome and Introduction: Ethan Zuckerman

presented by Ethan Zuckerman

As we dug into this topic, we realized research gets forbidden for all sorts of reasons. We’re going to talk about topics today that are forbidden in some sense because they’re so big, they’re so consequential, that it’s extremely difficult for anyone to think about who should actually have the right to make this decision. We’re going to talk about some topics that end up being off the table, that end up being forbidden, because they’re kind of icky. They’re really uncomfortable. And frankly, if you make it through this day without something making you uncomfortable, we did something wrong in planning this event.

Forbidden Research Welcome and Introduction: Joi Ito

presented by Joi Ito

Talking to people who study the history of science, and you look at Nobel Prize winners, many of them have really taken sort of career-threatening risks in order to win Nobel Prizes. So even science, which feels like an area where you’re supposed to question authority and think for yourself, you actually have to be rather risk-taking and disobedient.

Framing Art with Larp

presented by Ebba Petren

I started out by wanting to get rid of what troubled me with larping. And I did that by creating something new. I not only ended up with this arts collective responsible for a series of performances, but I was also finding my gates to a whole new field of artistic research.

Girls in Armour – a Danish Feminist Movement

presented by Ann Eriksen

In 2009, when we began this initiative, there weren’t really that many women around to play these games. They were usually, “I’m the musician. I’m the one who carries the standard. I’m at home making food.”

Larp and…

presented by Eleanor Saitta

I’m going talk to you guys about larp and. Larp and a whole lot of other things. Because I think the most interesting things about larp are maybe not actually larp itself, but when larp meets a whole bunch of the rest of the world.

Does Larp Design Matter?

presented by Eirik Fatland

When we design larps, we’re playing basically with the building block of culture. Not just of fictional cultures, real culture as well. But asking people to act as if is not enough to make a larp. As larp writers, we need you to act as if, together.

Larp as Adaptation

presented by Evan Torner

A larp takes a space and makes a place in which we create fiction with our bodies, and our voices. Although the larp medium certainly shares a lineage with the theater and the oral storytelling tradition, most of the fiction that we consume comes in other forms.

Experimental Anthropology

presented by Kaisa Kangas

In experimental archaeology, we could for instance try to make the kind of shoes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have had, and test how long they last in use.

But what if we are interested in completely different kinds of questions. Like, did they have rules for whom you’re allowed to have sex with? How did they raise their kids? We could always look at existing hunter-gatherer cultures and guess that the culture might have been similar. But could we attempt to test our hypotheses, someway?

Mindful Cyborgs #51 — Nordic Larp, Social Change, and Free-will Agency with Eleanor Saitta

presented by Chris Dancy, Eleanor Saitta, Klint Finley, Sara M. Watson

Change is going to happen. I guess in a lot of cases I see my role in the world as trying desperately to build enough tools, and enough understanding of how they work and how they can be used, and to get that stuff out into the world enough so that when stuff inevitably breaks and falls apart and explodes in our faces, we’ve got kind of a first aid kit that we can reach for.

The Conversation #39 — Richard Saul Wurman

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Richard Saul Wurman

Conversation has been consistently a model in my head of being human. For quite a while I’ve spoken about how we’re not taught at any time in our life how to ask a question, and how to talk on the phone. And most people think they know how to ask a question, and they know how to talk on the phone. And yet I found that 98% of questions are either bad questions or speeches. And most phone calls are terrible.