↑Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and Editor-in-Chief of “↑American Anthropologist“. Somewhat belated I first heard of him when in 2006 his article “↑A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies“ appeared in the newly founded journal “Games and Culture” [1(1):29-35]. Beyond his issues Indonesia, gender and queer studies, Tom does research on persistent state worlds, and even has an office in “↑Second Life“ (SL): (SLurl:) ↑Ethnographia. Among other things there you can get a notecard on what ethnography is all about, and another one with a great list of literature on research … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Don’t ask—just felt like it … … Continue reading
It seems that ↑Cory Doctorow somehow managed to virally spread his on- and offline looks Snow-Crash style. ↑Charles Stross ↑commented the above, non-doctored (pun not intended) picture like that: I sometimes collaborate with sometime Campbell Award winner, EFF activist, and all-around happening guy Cory Doctorow. Cory is a big noise in campaigning for consumer rights against the big copyright cartels, and he comes up with an idea a minute and gives them away for free under creative commons a license. Yet he sure as hell wasn’t the model for Manfred in “↵Accelerando“ (because I hadn’t met him at the … Continue reading
Some years ago during lunch, sitting at a table besides me, two n00b-computer-scientists, young lads who just had started their first term of studies, had a conversation about the World Wide Web (WWW). Consensus between them was that HTML was dead, and that Flash was the future. Period. Now, some years later, have a look at the websites of hardcore top-notch coders and you’ll never find Flash, but clear-as-glass HTML or XML. It of course is another thing with commercial company websites, agreed. But we are talking cyberculture in a holistical sense here, not PR or marketing stuff. The … Continue reading
Over the past year the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) and its supporting foresight partners have explored the virtual and 3D future of the World Wide Web in a first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project, the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR). We use the term Metaverse in a way that includes and builds upon Neal Stephenson’s coinage in the cyberpunk science fiction novel, Snow Crash, which envisioned a future broadly reshaped by virtual and 3D technologies. SMART, JOHN, JAMAIS CASCIO, AND JERRY PFAFFENDORF. 2007. ↑Metaverse Roadmap Overview. Mountain View: ↑Acceleration Studies Foundation, ↑metaverseroadmap.org. Electronic Document. Available online: http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/overview/ http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf … Continue reading
Michael Buckbee runs a “fabjectory”—a wormhole-Stargate connecting ↑cyberspace and ↑meatspace. Fabjectory is a combined word out of fabject and factory. ↑Fabject, like ↑spime, is a neologism by cyberpunk’s chief-ideologist Mr. ↑Bruce Sterling, and means an everyday object made by rapid manufacturing means, like ↑3D printing. ↑Buckbee’s Fabjectory offers an according service. E.g. within “↑Second Life“ (SL) you can go to his Fabjectory there, have your avatar photographed, and presto some weeks later a statuette of it will arrive at your place in meatspace. As an example I chose Lex Luthor above: To the left is a screenshot of the … Continue reading
Once upon a time, when I was a kid, as a present I received a thick catalogue of the works of ↑M. C. Escher—since back then ↵I am hooked. In ↑reply to my telling Weird Tales—see also ↵visual phenomena—, today I received a nice e-mail which rubbed my nose upon one of Escher’s famous lithographs: “↑Reptilien“ (1943). Again wondering at the picture I cherish since decades, suddenly it came to my mind: It’s the perfect metaphor for my cyberanthropological research-project “↵maxmod“. A twodimensional representation of the li’l beasts crawling out of 2D-space, ↵into 3D-space, and back again … meaning those … Continue reading
Note the filling station to the right—straight out of the Gernsback Continuum: “During the high point of the Downes Age they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations.”—William Gibson On 23 August 2007 I spawned at ↑Detect Surface‘s working platform, high in the sky above the (SLurl:) ↑City of Abaddon. Detect was just about to finish the colour-changing head-up display (HUD) for the motorcycle he was constructing since quite some time. When he saw me he asked, if I’d help him and testdrive the bike—I became (SLurl:) ↑D&D Creative Labs‘ testpilot. During testing I duly … Continue reading