A verse for the future of… healing, many times over. How we get there!
There’s an image I hold in my head. It’s of a butler trying desperately to blow out a light, as the servants look on.
The night before the rooms were festooned with candles made from whale blubber. Another thought: asked what these radio waves signify when he first discovered it in the 1880s Hertz shrugged his shoulders; some body might have a use for it.
In 2007 at a Keynote in Norway, I spoke about technologies and styles of the future. Back then it was the Metaverse, smart mobs and a style of filmmaking that was cinematic. The Net was still finding its feet outside the core group who got it and benefitted from the market of ideas in Dotcom 1.
It was a time of blowing out lights and thinking what might the Net do. Hertz would be doing somersaults if he could be around to witness this thing.
In the burgeoning 2000s I was there, here and about, working for a slew of companies such as Justgiving.com as its editor; Reactive which created non-linear story platforms and would lead us to work with the Heavyweight boxer Lennox Lewis against his fight with Tyson in the US.
And then going it alone on www.viewmagazine.tv, we built a virtual rubik’s cube that unveiled an interactive narrative depending on how you solved the puzzle.
A Global map, the vlog butterfly enabled anyone to question VIPs from any part of the world, who answered them. In this image, a senior BBC figure.
The future is at times a morpheus strip and this summer the pleasure was engaging with futurism in three independent international projects: the British Library’s 500 Years of News exhibition, one of the top supranational tech companies in the world, and Metaverse storytelling from a tech fund.
There’s much to unpack from these in how social, cultures, diversity, technologies and futurism will impact our lives. If you’d like to know more drop me a line at Cardiff University, Gyimahd@cardiff.ac.uk
The term the Metaverse you know was popularised from Neil Stephenson’s 1992 book, Snowcrash:
“Hero is approaching the street. It is the broadway, the Champ Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lens of his goggles. It does not really exist, but right now millions of people are walking up and down it”.
Science fiction imagined…just as in Gibson’s Neuromancer and Cyberspace. Me? The future that’s being handpicked should be about healing…the environment, warming, plastics. But how to do that with commerce so it looks enticing? It has what’s referred to as Shiny thing syndrome. Of course there’s a ton of sci-fi that paints other pictures.
This week I went o a major show at the Southbank, In the Black Fantastic featuring the work of Nick Cave, who social challenge in this Sound Suit arising from the Rodney King beating in 1991 encapsulates social-futurism.
His website says
Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represent both brutality and empowerment.
There’s two major development from my work over the summer yet to emerge. The first, 180991. It asks the question if you could go back thirty years to speak to any of the Black luminaries, VIPs. pioneers, who might they be? It builds on what happened to me. I presented a radio show. We thought the show’s archive had been dumped; at least much of it had, but we’ve since unearthed archive of astonishing interviews. For example, Fela Kuti, Melvin Van Peebles and Eartha Kitt.
This next project I can’t say much here yet, but in the meantime, I’m buoyed by the work of Karen Palmer, Prof Edmond Prakash, Drew Currie, Derek Miiro, Nasma Aljizawi, Stefania Barbaglio, Lee Roberston and Mayo Twala to name a few.
More news on www.viewmagazine.tv www.videojournalism.co.uk and https://lnkd.in/dth9gph
#tech #work #development #future #diversity #filmmaking #projects #storytelling #futurism
