Letters from the Anthropocene

the writings and ramblings of trevor haldenby; digital media innovator, futurist, and photographer

[steve-salmon]

[michaelcrichtonsjurassicpark]

Page 6

[longnowsalon]

For our 100th post on Tumblr, here’s one of the great texts about Long Now: the essay by Brian Eno that gave name to the Clock and our organization. “The Big Here and the Long Now" was written in 01995 before the Foundation was formally founded. Long Now existed only as an idea in conversation between Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, Eno, Kevin Kelly, and others back then. Now we have thousands of members, the Clock-building is under way, and tomorrow we open our new public space. 

"Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest stories while overlooking longer-term issues - the real human interest.

Photo by Kelly Ida Scope from the Eno-Hillis Seminar in January 02014.  More here.

[colouringpagesmykidsaskedme2make]

"A Triceratops Eating a Pegasus Like a Carnivore"

[trevver]

I've spent most of the past two weeks in Austria, with the brain-juicing artists, designers, and time travellers of the Time's Up collective, and their allies from across Europe.

We shared our strategies for bringing the future(s) to life, wrote a book in the foothills of the Alps (publication info forthcoming), and generally made a game out of mirroring the expansion and contraction of the universe with our minds! http://timesup.org/DE14

[trevver]

Ah, the life of a cyborg monitor lizard....

[trevver]

Bringing my Graduate Research to the Web

It's been about 9 months since the apocalyptic transmedia adventure called ZED.TO was supposed to come to an end…. and since then, it's been extended and adapted and all-over evolved, not to mention presented at venues from Vegas to NASA Research Park to TED.

This book-length exploration into the creation of the project, and my motivations to design and reflect on it as a futurist, took me just about a year to write. Hopefully it's a bit faster to read. ;)

Submitted to OCAD University for the degree of Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. This book reflects on a research project exploring the use of transmedia storytelling techniques to materialize speculative future scenarios. It also highlights a transmedia futures project called ZED.TO, created in 2012 in Toronto by Trevor Haldenby and The Mission Business.

Available for PDF download and reading at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/164913914/Bringing-the-Future-to-Life-Pervasive-Transmedia-Scenarios-and-the-World-of-Worlding

[trevver]

David Attenborough tells me that there's some pretty snazzy geolocative dance-lessons goin' on in the beehives of the world.

[trevver]

Last night, I watched EUROPA REPORT, a found-footage film about humanity's first manned voyage beyond the planetary orbit in which we evolved.... and the discovery of something unsettlingly advanced beneath the icy crust of a Jovian moon. The film's execution has a number of weak spots, many of them connected to what was surely a limited budget, but on the whole it's a pretty awesome experience. There aren't as many cheap thrills as you'll find in Apollo 18, you get a few amazing scenes featuring District 9's Sharlto Copley ("fooking prawns, man!"), and much of the story unfolds through various system displays aboard the fictional spacecraft at the story's core. For someone like me, who is interested in the technological metadata of a good science fiction yarn as much as the dramatized character interactions and conflict, this approach to storytelling is a dream come true. The film's creators crafted a website for the story's fictional space exploration company, Europa Ventures LLC, but much of it seems locked away behind a password wall... maybe I need to up my game in terms of transmedia rabbit-hunting in order to get the full experience.

Europa Report is out on VOD now, with a limited theatrical release apparently coming in August 2013. If you're a fan of science fiction metadata and cross-format diegesis like me, it's a must-see!

[villavillacoola-blog-blog]

7/5/13

L.A.! 

janky ass mofucka

[trevver]

#Graduatigrams!

[trevver]

My, but it's been an interesting year for the future of lifestyle biotechnology! In early 2012, I launched a synbio startup with four friends from high school through an incubator we're calling The Mission Business. Over the course of the year, that startup (called ByoLogyc) went on to release five blockbuster products combining the genetic material of synthetic and natural organisms into highly lucrative lifestyle enhancement solutions.

One of them, ByoRenew, was so successful that it even went... viral! While we did have to shut down ByoLogyc's celebrations at the Toronto Fringe Festival by subjecting all of their guests to an invasive medical procedure, and we were pushed into running a free immunization clinic for the deadly BRX Virus (the world's FIRST synthetic pandemic!), and we had no choice but to evacuate hundreds of Toronto's citizens to ByoLogyc's private... er.... sterilization facility, it was a GREAT year to live in the future!

And now, I have a question for you, prospective ByoLogyc customer...

At what point in the story did I grab the attention of your inner design futurist?

ByoLogyc was an extremely innovative company... but a fictional one. Creating the company was an exercise in worldbuilding - the creation of a universe in which stories about the future can play out, rather than a whitepaper or an essay. The world of ByoLogyc came to life for a project about the reckless pursuit of a commercial biotechnological future for a project called ZED.TO. Thousands of people who engaged the company at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the World Future Society conference, Autodesk University, and even TED in Long Beach early this year!

By immersing people in visceral, narrative, and multiplatform experiences that simulate various possible futures, we can make some interesting inquiries into the way we think about those futures. How often do we think about them emotionally? How often do we think about the implications for our day-to-day lives? How often do we consider the future as a place where we ALL live, rather than just a few technophile individuals?

This is a conversation that needs to happen - and it needs to happen across all of the hills and valleys of the media ecology in which we live. It needs to happen on websites, through social media, at live-action immersive and social events, via web videos, and even through interactions with physical replicas of products from the future.  This weekend I'll be attending the 5D Institute at USC's SCIENCE OF FICTION workshop - an exercise (or perhaps an adventure) that will see 60-odd genius designers, storytellers, futurists, and other researchers come together to collaboratively design a future scenario together! This kind of collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to futures is familiar to me from my graduate research at OCAD University's Strategic Innovation Lab, but it's an amazing opportunity to try the approach on for size with a network of strangers (for now) and a different context - LA trumps Toronto pretty squarely this rainy time of the year!

I'm looking forward to sharing stories about the transmedia design (and violent downfall) of my future dystopia, as part of the ZED.TO project I created with my design firm The Mission Business, and also co-creating a future we can all live in... one that's hopefully a little less fascistic than ByoLogyc's.

[tedxsummerisle]

Building (Murderous) Community

Thank you everyone who volunteered their time and labour to create this strange event, the worst TEDx in history. To be clear: this was a piece of experimental horror fiction. No TED attendees were harmed in the making of this event and we aren’t associated with either TED or either of the Wicker Man films.

You can relive the story at #TEDxSummerisle, or at this Storify link.

[trevver]

TEDx OCADU - January 19th, 2012

[trevver]

So this is going to be a cool event - http://www.tedxocadu.com

[trevver]

I've got ByoLogyc on the brain, lately.

[trevver]

This is going to be a fun conference presentation...

Just when I thought I was out, ByoLogyc pulled me back in... in the year 2025!

https://www.autodeskuniversity2012.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=5189