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Knutepunkt 2017 Keynote: Present, by Eleanor Saitta

I think of larp in a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as sto­ry­telling for the net­work age. This is sto­ry­telling in the first-person present tense plur­al, and it is not very often that human­i­ty comes up with a new tense in which to tell sto­ries. That’s actu­al­ly kind of a big deal.

We Need A New Image of Africa

To have the hunter tell it, Africa is full of meek sto­ries about des­per­a­tion and despair. So when artists like myself offer an alter­nate vision, often we’re asked to defend our imag­i­na­tion. Why do we feel we have the lux­u­ry to cre­ate? Shouldn’t we be deal­ing with more impor­tant issues like cor­rup­tion, or war, or AIDS, or poverty?

Ethical Machines episode 1: Mark Riedl

Computers can tell sto­ries but they’re always sto­ries that humans have input into a com­put­er, which are then just being regur­gi­tat­ed. But they don’t make sto­ries up on their own. They don’t real­ly under­stand the sto­ries that we tell. They’re not kind of aware of the cul­tur­al impor­tance of sto­ries. They can’t watch the same movies or read the same books we do. And this seems like this huge miss­ing gap between what com­put­ers can do and humans can do if you think about how impor­tant sto­ry­telling is to the human condition. 

The Spawn of Frankenstein: Unintended Consequences

Victor’s sin was­n’t in being too ambi­tious, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in play­ing God. It was in fail­ing to care for the being he cre­at­ed, fail­ing to take respon­si­bil­i­ty and to pro­vide the crea­ture what it need­ed to thrive, to reach its poten­tial, to be a pos­i­tive devel­op­ment for soci­ety instead of a disaster.

Mythophysics of the New Normal

The future is on the whole a won­der­ful thing because it will bring us new things that we haven’t seen before. And that’s why we stick around.

Does Larp Design Matter?

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

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.

What Should We Know About Algorithms?

When I go talk about this, the thing that I tell peo­ple is that I’m not wor­ried about algo­rithms tak­ing over human­i­ty, because they kind of suck at a lot of things, right. And we’re real­ly not that good at a lot of things we do. But there are things that we’re good at. And so the exam­ple that I like to give is Amazon rec­om­mender sys­tems. You all run into this on Netflix or Amazon, where they rec­om­mend stuff to you. And those algo­rithms are actu­al­ly very sim­i­lar to a lot of the sophis­ti­cat­ed arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence we see now. It’s the same underneath.

The Conversation #26 — Jenny Lee

The worst-case sce­nario for Detroit would be that the archi­tec­ture of the Internet as it is now con­tin­ues, and Detroiters’ sto­ries, voic­es, lives, are absent. And the New York Times sto­ry about the cre­ative class sav­ing Detroit, or the doc­u­men­tary about the aban­don­ment and whole­sale destruc­tion of Detroit that por­trays it as a waste­land and a blank can­vas ready for entre­pre­neur­ial exploita­tion, that those sto­ries are defin­ing the nation­al, the glob­al imag­i­na­tion of what Detroit is. And that those sto­ries, they don’t use influ­ence peo­ple’s desire to come here and do those things and live that life, though that’s part of it, but it also shapes the per­cep­tion of peo­ple inside the city.

The Conversation #18 — David Korten

I like to think that we are an intel­li­gent species. I mean, actu­al­ly the peo­ple that often get this most quick­ly are the peo­ple who are poor­est, because they know the sys­tem does­n’t work. But so many of our sup­pos­ed­ly bright­est peo­ple pick this up and don’t ques­tion it. And then we have the all the whole field of eco­nom­ics, which is an ide­ol­o­gy built on assump­tions that if you exam­ine them are absurd. Because you know, econ­o­mists sim­ply look at the econ­o­my as a pric­ing sys­tem. They’re not sys­tem thinkers. Part of the cause our cri­sis is that we’re not edu­cat­ed to think in terms of systems. 

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