"Federated learning: out of reach no matter how close",Oleksandr Lapshyn
Neo-Nomads & Context Collapse
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
New Sovereignties
Neo-Nomads, Context Collapse & The Strange
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
30 speakers from all over the world across two
days and multiple venues under the theme of
utopias
Resonate IO
43 Talks & 24 Performances across three
venues over four days in Belgrade, Serbia
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
In a globally networked society, conventional borders no longer make sense.
The Gig Economy, affordable intercontinental travel, and Airbnb’s are breeding
a new kind of IRL neo-nomad.
We no longer have to live anywhere or do anything permanently.
Our existence, in fact, is more concrete on platforms, in the cloud and through
the data we generate and collect.
We are a people that are constantly in flux, constantly in a state of preparation
for what is coming next.
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Context Collapse
Perfect Parity / Hyper Realities
The Grotesque and the Weird
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The new individuals can live anywhere, adapt or conform to
any situation.
In some cases this means assimilating themselves to the
point of homogenization.
In other ways this means subverting norms and expressing
themselves in wild, and sometimes bizarre ways.
These are individuals who have access to all points of
reference all at once. A veritable global neural network that
defies and ignores borders.
They are global, shape-shifting cyborgs.
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“Tell either side there’s
no wall. You bought a
war.”
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● 1 million reddit users
● Paint one pixel each, every
five minutes
● Over 16 million pixels
painted
● Competition for space,
territory designs played out
over real time
● Resulting in a giant,
borderless, messy collage
● Represents multiple cultures,
countries, aesthetics, in-
jokes, memes, etc
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The Stack
In lieu of geographical boundaries, author Benjamin Bratton
imagines the world through six layers, or stacks.
We interface, engage and interact more through these layers than
we do geographically now.
For example: If I am an American generating data that is collected
in Belgrade, who does it belong to? Where does it exist exactly?
What about data collected in a region whose national identity is
contested globally?
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
Conflict emerges when everyone
defines utopia/dystopia
differently
“Our world is built in clicks, views
& shares”
Form&’s sculpture Microutopias
is a physical installation that
explores how utopias can “form,
coalesce, disperse, and form
again.”
Asks, what are the implications
of being exposed to so many
ideas, cultures, beliefs, and
communities all at once?
How do they throw into question
the meaning of utopian or
dystopian futures?
Micro-Utopias /// Form&
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We are all part of the same system.
Every brand, product, consumer,
regardless of choice, is in some
capacity interrelated and connected.
Distinctions between concepts no
longer mean the same thing they once
did.
“It’s all still salsa”
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
Everything by David OReilly
A game where players can
literally be “everything”
Move as an essence in the
world through animals,
objects, phenomena
“Everything depicts a world
where all objects are both
combined and separated,
paradoxically of the same
substance yet with
unfathomable gaps
between them.”
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
Short film about an AI that
develops in a satellite and
travels to Earth
Imagines what a sentience that
has “access to everything” would
want to become.
“Total recall, forever”: What does
it mean to be a conscious neural
network?
Only conclusion: To be an artist.
To embrace the irrational. Love,
cruelty, truth.
Geomancer
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In consuming and creating the same stuff everywhere, both similarities and
differences emerge, regardless of location.
The web exposes everyone, even if just in a superficial way, to different cultural
touchstones. They become raw material for creative work in all areas of the world.
Thinking about culture through geographical boundaries no longer makes sense
when all cultures have unfettered access to each other.
The irony of globalization is that it both opens up access to multiple cultures at once
while homogenizing those cultures at the same time.
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by FAITH POPCORN’S BRAINRESERVE
Context Collapse
The homogenization of expression and communication through
social media.
Example: Photos out plane windows, with tigers, handstands, food.
Only a handful of filters (re: Snapchat AR) everyone is using.
In turn, this pervasive sameness begins affecting the real world:
What is photographed, where we’re photographed, etc.
Companies can no longer glean anything from consumers because
they all act/look the same online.
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Neo-Nomads /// Placelessness
Welcome to Air Space
Airbnb’s have spread throughout
the world.
Homogenization of space to
fulfill expectations of comfort
The Airbnb look or aesthetic:
Generic, characterless, sterile.
Can be “filled in” by any people,
traveling anywhere.
Cultivating a “harmonization of
taste” among consumers.
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Surging popularity of casual adventure/travel wear
Always prepared to go anywhere.
Always ready for any climate or condition.
Neo-Nomads /// Placelessness
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The DNA Journey
● Reveal historical genetic make-
up to individuals.
● Present their results as mixed,
borderless.
● Throws into question national,
cultural and ethnic identity.
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Casa Jasmina /// Permanent Beta (Bruce Sterling & Jasmina Tesanovic)
“Open-sourced, connected home of
the future” in Turin, Italy
"A laboratory for experiments in
home automation and the Internet
of Things"
“You should never trust a utopia
without an expiration date.”
“The idea that we would get out of
it is what made it successful.”
Open Airbnb, so anyone could live
with the designs and their
designers.
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Imagining durable, open-sourced, internet-
connected design as coextensive with a
nomadic, modular lifestyle
A temperature control system, a sensor tower, a
lightning system, an amplifier, a small thermal printer
and a smart mirror. All made by hand in Fablab
Torino, with open source technologies that are
available to anyone.
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Mandate around content:
Tantalizing, terrifying, taboo topic per issue.
We don’t often give respect to spaces that have the most
influence: video games, pornography
Nostalgia as a source of mixing high/low culture
Talking about things we care about today is more intimate
than Tinder.
Sofa Magazine /// Ricarda Messner &
Caia Hagel
Sample topics: cybersupportgroups, hook-up apps,
webcam love, virtual nationhood, net art, hacking &
stalking, porn tag hegemonies, AI empathy, political
videogaming & digital sexercising
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Perfect Parity/Hyper Realities
What happens when we finally arrive at the point when reality can be
wholly reconstructed virtually?
How do we distinguish the virtual from the real? What are the
implications for evidence, truth and proof?
Once we reach the upper bands of parity, how do we progress
forward, beyond that achievement?
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Perfect Parity /// Hyper Realities
Now at the point where we can
create images that are practically
indiscernible from reality
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Hyper Realities
Increasingly perfecting how well we
can virtually recreate “reality”
The magic of CGI is “broken” when
the difference between it and reality
is indiscernible.
Dangerous implications of not being
able to tell the difference between
real and virtual
We can now make reality “more real”
than itself.
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The Weird & The Eerie
“We could go so far as to say that it is the
human condition to be grotesque, since
the human animal is the one that does
not fit in, the freak of nature who has no
place in the natural order and is capable
of recombining nature’s products into
hideous new forms”
- Mark Fisher, The Weird & The
Eerie
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The Weird & The Eerie
A way of distinguishing oneself online.
Breaking the homogenizing the effects of Context
Collapse.
Moving laterally away from the arbitrary distinction
between real and virtual.
Use digital detritus, messiness, the bizarre to make
oneself stand out and move virally.
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Both for weirdness sake and as a political act.
Blurring boundaries helps us question why those
borders exist in the first place.
Tradition is subverted to create something new.
Blurring the borders between
conventional objects
Dark Matter
Shiv Integer
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Warburton’s “Wilderness”
Rather than recreate reality, create
something so unreal as to render it
wholly unique.
Strangeness as defying the status quo.
Hyper-reality requires big Hollywood budgets.
Weirdness can be accomplished by individual artists.
More durable, viral. Spreads because it is so bizarre.
Also: Inherent intimacy in its rawness & emotion.
Coordinated Movement
Uterus Man
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Cool 3D World
Videos often make no
sense whatsoever.
Watch with incredulity.
Often involve the human
body being contorted and
twisted in unrealistic and
discomforting ways.
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SUPER DELUXE
A production studio that generates
virality through live video and
across multiple social media
platforms.
Absurd, weird, zany.
According to Hammer, there’s no
reason all these seemingly
unrelated projects shouldn’t exist
side by side — there’s no brand
identity more compelling than
“complete creative freedom.”
Leveraging the “punk rock” energy
of YouTube creators’ culture.
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Kenneth Tin-Kin hung
Absurd pastiche of corporate
and political aesthetics on a
global level.
Everything is juxtaposed and
smashed together, implying
a systemic connection
across geographical
boundaries.
Silly, over-the-top, weird.
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Yves Tumor
“Serpent Music is a slippery album, as it’s title
suggests, made more so by its allusions to
spirituality, including a song named for Dajjal,
Islam’s antichrist, and a lighter, maybe more
hopeful one called “Role in Creation.” We don’t
know if we are in heaven or hell here, and that
seems to be the point.”
Confrontational, messy, noisy, a fusion of styles,
dialects, sounds. No singular point of reference.
Remains anonymous and unanchored to any
identity or geographical location.
Anonymous but many identities all at once.
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Takeaways
Brands must constantly adapt to new conditions, identities, contexts. Always evolving, to be in a
constant state of flux
Everyone is always competing with everything else. It’s no longer about one type of consumer,
brand or product in their own domain – everything is interrelated regardless of context.
Distinguish yourself – Don’t blend in. Context Collapse means it is easy to conform to a singular
identity. Leverage social media, so that the work stands out.
The weird, bizarre, strange – these are durable. Their uniqueness lends them to virality. Don’t
need to go overboard with production values just need a singular vision that distinguishes it from
everything else.
Editor's Notes
Image: Eva Papamargariti
BLADE RUNNER 2049 - Official Trailer
Over 1 million Reddit users waged a virtual war to create this bizarre work of art with 16 million pixels
The Stack by Benjamin Bratton | MIT Press
Internet Age Media Special Projects: Micro-Utopias presented by Form&
Clip from new show American Gods.
The “New Gods” clash with the “Old Gods” each representing meaning, purpose and culture and how they’ve evolved from old institutions into new ones.
Mr. World goes on a rant about interconnectivity and systems relating it to branding. Sure there is choice, but in a globalization there is still just one product. All part of a larger system.
Everything, a Must-Play Game Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before
As you occupy the life of a family of algae or read the thoughts of a television with relationship problems, Watts tells you about the basic interconnectivity of all things, the way in which we are all a part of one grand, luminescent thing. It's symbiosis on a mass scale, writ across the innumerable bodies that populate the universe.
O'Reilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an "organism that keeps going." Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrate to your own whims.
In 2065, a Military Satellite Becomes Self-Aware—and Wants to Become an Artist
The weird + eerie: an interview with Lawrence Lek on crossing the line + exposing the deeply embedded through VR
I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience
1. WELCOME TO AIRSPACE: How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world
1. Apolis, Monocle, and the branding of the ‘Placeless Aesthetic’
“Placeless fashion takes its meaning from the authenticity of the “non-place”, the French philosopher Marc Auge’s term for anonymous spaces like airports and malls. Perhaps these days, we identify more closely with the ambiguities of these spaces than the easy geographical definitions of specific countries or cities. Our clothing is evolving in turn.”
2. LOT-2046
3. Where Well-Made Basics and Good Conscience Come in the Same Bag
“No matter what I tried on, though, or how I styled it in the canvas tent that serves as a fitting room, the clothes had a strange homogenizing effect. Rather than wearing my political values, or my eccentricities of taste, on my sleeve, I was instead sandpapered into an innocuous cipher. The clothes took the edge off with almost narcotic precision. From every angle, I looked exactly the same: a man with nowhere to be, and all the time in the world to be there.”
First Came Normcore. Now Get Ready for Gorpcore.
The Prepper Obsession With Clothes
Casa Jasmina combines Italian design with connected home technologies **DYLAN -- I don’t follow the third, fourth and fifth points here -- can you clarify or be ready to talk to this
"Maker spaces, hackspaces and collaborative design offices are appearing all over the world as part of a big, global trend toward open-source design, networked collaboration and digital manufacturing," said Sterling. "But – in the future – what would it be like to live that way in daily life?"
Casa Jasmina
POSTCARD FROM CASA JASMINA: THE HOME OF THE FUTURE AT SALONE DEL MOBILE
Postcard from Casa Jasmina – Chatting with the Home of the Future is an interactive installation representing a compact version of the home of the future. The exhibition is part of tech.NO.MAD – Feeling at Home Everywhere, an event born in collaboration with ThingsCon Milan, growITup, Cariplo Factory, THINGS and The Good Home. Five days of talks, workshops and exhibits on the concept of a neo-nomadic lifestyle. Because nowadays, with the aid of technology, one can feel at home anytime and anywhere.
The installation is made of six devices, framed in simple and archetypal wooden structures, for six of the most common functions in a domestic setting: a temperature control system, a sensor tower, a lightning system, an amplifier, a small thermal printer and a smart mirror. All made by hand in Fablab Torino, with open source technologies that are available to anyone.
Sofa Magazine
After Generation Z’s prophecies in SOFA 1, which showed, among other dazzling themes, how digital life informs contemporary identity, personal relationship and economic, political and social power for teens today—we journey deeper into cyberspace with post-teens for SOFA II.
While orbiting the new frontiers of cybersupportgroups, hook up apps, webcam love, virtual nationhood, net art, hacking & stalking, porn tag hegemonies, AI empathy, political videogaming & digital sexercising, we look at the allure of digital relationships and how these are a new meta level of loving and being that solve some of yesterday’s problems while creating new ones for tomorrow. We interview mavericks and uncover the glitzy participation promoted by cyberculture to ask whether it is real democracy or if user-friendly atmospheres mask deeper emotional and psychological manipulations.
In the bedroom, the boardroom and the political alleys, SOFA II lays out what’s brand new in sexy, and unsexy, technologically fuelled connections. Through confessions, inquiries, essays, interviews, fashion futurisms and passionate dispatches, we find out what our brains, our hearts—and our digital lives—really are, and where all this is heading.
Hyperreal CG
This Artist Used a Computer Model of His Face to get a French National ID
Merge Simpson, Spongebool and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez are in Berlin
Cite:
Yves Tumor
Alan Warburton (“The Frontier”, artists he cites)
Matthew Hernandez-Plummer
Morehshin Allahyari
M. Hernandez Plummer - Shiv Integer
Shiv Integer is a bot making assemblage art for 3D printers. Rummaging through Thingiverse, the biggest online 3D-Print community and a vast archive of user-made models - full of knick-knacks and engineering parts - the bot picks objects at random to conjoin into sculptures and gives them apt word-salad names such as "disc on top of an e-juice golf." The process follows a lineage of Dadaist readymade and chance art, but also explores the authorship-inheritance of Creative Commons licensing, as well as performing an archiving of an Internet subculture, taking cross-database snapshots of 3D-Print culture.
Morehshin Allahyari - Dark Matter
Dark Matter is a series of combined, sculptural objects modeled in Maya and 3D printed to form humorous juxtapositions.; The objects chosen for the first series are the objects/things that are banned or un-welcome in Iran by the government. The objects that in many other countries people use or own freely but under Iranian government laws (for several reasons) are forbidden or discouraged to use. Owning some of these objects/things (dog, dildo, gun, neck tie, satellite dish, etc.) means going to jail, or getting a fine, or constantly being under the risk of getting arrested or bothered by the moral police. By printing and bringing the virtual 3D into physical existence, I want to simultaneously resist and bring awareness about the power that constantly threatens, discourages, and actively works against the ownership of these items in Iran. No matter how functional, through 3D printing, I am able to re-create and archive a collection of forbidden objects. In a way, the sculptural objects serve as a documentation of lives (my own life included) lived under oppressions and dictatorship. This is the documentation of a history full of red lines drawn in the most private aspect of one’s life.
What will happen when you re-contextualize the forbidden/banned/taboos? Could inserting the sculptures into another time and space change our relationship to these objects and challenge us to enter an historical dimension of the work? In other words, through positioning the tabooed I want to re-emphasize the dramatic and ironic aspect of forbidden; When looking back in twenty years, how would it feel to re-visit this collection?
Mike Pelletier - Coordinated Movement
Q. and A.: Lu Yang on Art, ‘Uterus Man’ and Living Life on the Web
Cool 3D World Instagram
The Viral Machine
If Super Deluxe is the future of entertainment, it’s because it isn’t much like a TV channel or a media company. It’s more like a tool for supporting inexperienced talent in a entertainment world that’s been stuck in its ways. Being on every single platform at once makes Super Deluxe as multi-functional as a Swiss army knife. It can serve as a translator between two parties — the amateurs of the internet and the stubborn pros of Hollywood — who are constantly dancing around each other. That idea courses through every single thing Super Deluxe produces. The studio will bring Joanne the Scammer, an Instagram star, to TV. It took a viral homemade documentary to Sundance. It intends to monetize Facebook Live by throwing together young talent and unique tech on a rickety, bare-bones platform. Super Deluxe’s hustle mimics that of the stars it hopes to create — success could be anywhere, so you might as well try everything.
Bizarre and Beautiful: The Imaginative Mind of Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung
And then came Serpent Music, Tumor’s biggest statement yet. It is a beguiling introduction to a larger world, featuring the incredibly soulful highlight “The Feeling When You Walk Away,” which almost sounds like a lost B-side from a 1970s funk band. But then Tumor shifts quickly to lefter contexts, including songs filled with ambient nature sounds, field recordings of a man talking, harsh and fuzzy loops, and then, ultimately, what sounds like a choir of angels. Serpent Music is a slippery album, as it’s title suggests, made more so by its allusions to spirituality, including a song named for Dajjal, Islam’s antichrist, and a lighter, maybe more hopeful one called “Role in Creation.” We don’t know if we are in heaven or hell here, and that seems to be the point.