Archive

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Valencia James

We are envi­sion­ing low-cost open hard­ware, open source soft­ware, that would allow artists to cre­ate vir­tu­al per­for­mances in Mozilla Hubs, which is a social vir­tu­al­i­ty plat­form. And through­out this process that was very much spear­head­ed by my artis­tic cre­ation of per­for­mance in Mozilla Hubs, we came up with an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram that would allow any artist to cre­ate their own live vol­u­met­ric performance.

Futures Podcast #6: Virtual Therapy, with Michael Carthy

Traditional psy­chol­o­gy and coun­sel­ing will help peo­ple under­stand in a very lin­ear way why they are the way they are. Whereas what I’m real­ly focused on and what I’ve been spe­cial­iz­ing in for the last num­ber of years is the how. And for me, vir­tu­al real­i­ty ther­a­py is the how of change.

Futures Podcast #2: Cybersex, with Dr. Trudy Barber

So then I thought right, what hap­pens with an artist who draws the body, who deals with the body all the time? I know, they have affairs with the life mod­el, don’t they? They have their muse. So I thought right, let’s take this, let’s look at tech­nol­o­gy, let’s have an affair with this tech. Let’s try and put the sex into it. Let’s sex up the technology. 

Futures Podcast #4: Emoji Delights, with Carla Gannis

AR mixed real­i­ty has more poten­tial, I think. With vir­tu­al real­i­ty, you’re just some­where else alto­geth­er, right? And VR is all the rage right now. But in terms of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion, in terms of keep­ing us in touch still with phys­i­cal, you know. I mean, it’s all real life now. I don’t even dis­tin­guish IRL/URL now. I mean it’s all real life. But like, how do we main­tain a foot in both simul­ta­ne­ous­ly? Both the vir­tu­al and the physical.

Humans as Software Extensions

What is this con­di­tion? I would sum­ma­rize it as peo­ple extend­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems by offer­ing their bod­ies, their sens­es, and their cog­ni­tion. And specif­i­cal­ly, bod­ies and minds that can be eas­i­ly plugged in and lat­er eas­i­ly be dis­card­ed. So bod­ies and minds algo­rith­mi­cal­ly man­aged and under the per­ma­nent pres­sure of con­stant avail­abil­i­ty, effi­cien­cy, and per­pet­u­al self-optimization. 

Virtual Futures Salon: Fucking Machines

We are here to talk about fuck­ing machines. In London, on a fog­gy evening, on a Tuesday, for yet anoth­er debate about fuck­ing machines. Another curat­ed dis­cus­sion under­lined by our own human inse­cu­ri­ty about ver­sions of us in sil­i­ca. Fucking anthro­po­mor­phic fuck­ing machines. Machines that fuck us. And let’s face it, machines are already fuck­ing us, or so we seem to be told.

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

So here’s what hap­pened. If you tell peo­ple you’re going to have this super-open, absolute­ly non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to sur­vive in this envi­ron­ment that’s based on mon­ey, where it has to make mon­ey, how does any­body square that cir­cle? How does any­body do any­thing? And so com­pa­nies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a cor­ner. There was exact­ly one busi­ness plan avail­able to them, which was advertising.

Forbidden Research: Sexual Deviance: Can Technology Protect our Children?

One of the big things that we’re going to talk about here is para­phil­ia. We’re going to talk about sex­u­al deviance. We’re going to talk about the prob­lem of peo­ple whose sex­u­al desires lead to attrac­tion to chil­dren, lead to attrac­tion towards vio­lent sex, lead to sex­u­al trans­gres­sion in one fash­ion or another.