Film & Multimedia Games & Play Politics & Economics Real Life Speculations
by Justin
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Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes
I return from the mirror world with a surnburnt nose/forehead combo; a bag bulging with books, papers and wallcharts; and a brain almost literally humming with new inputs. Along with @mathpunk, @rtgarden, @stevepuma and @genebecker, I was representing the Superstruct game community at the Institute For The Future’s 2009 Ten-Year Forecast in Sausalito, California.
Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.
Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land. At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.
Lifedump
What am I doing? What’s on my mind?
Listening to The Airborne Toxic Event’s self-titled studio album – a physical CD in brown paper and clear plastic. None of that newfangled digital paid-for download nonsense. Incidentally, my first proper music purchase since … November? Enjoying it in a non-threatening, sounds-a-bit-like-everything-else-I-own way.
Tracking comments about the freshly (re)launched Wired UK on twitter and the blogosphere, with the heightened susceptability to criticism (and taught innards) that comes from spending January with the editorial team as an intern. London launch party on Tuesday was something else, with familiar faces and – in retrospect – a truly disconcerting number of strange conversations.
Digesting notes and fragments from a weekend in Manchester, at the 4th Oekonux Conference. Bit of a mixed bag, with quite a lot lost in translation (both from various Germanic and Scandinavian languages to English, and from jargon-heavy engineering/programmerspeak to plain English). Still, I took a lot from the brain-shatteringly awesome presentations of Smári McCarthy and Vinay Gupta – the latter a key player in Superstruct. Key observations: scarcity is an illusion, transparency and openness are good, Manchester feels a bit like Moscow.