Digital_Heirloom

Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

Jeremy Keith

Charlie Rose, journalist, and Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, chat about media and advertising, including that the future most often happens with crackpots who are pre-startup, not with startups, and that successful enthusiasts are once-in-a-generation.

At PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011, a panel of experts including Ayesha Khanna of the Hybrid Reality Institute, Journalist Greg Lindsay, Allison Mooney from Google and Katherine Moriwaki of Parsons discussed our current relationship with technology and what’s coming next.

What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?

Part of Future States, a new series of short films exploring possible future scenarios through the prism of today’s global realities, Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity. One moment, a player is a Japanese schoolgirl embroiled in a pillow fight with her girlfriends — and the next moment, the player has suddenly morphed into a scandalized state senator defending himself against a throng of angry reporters.

Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. Identities become elastic as the players consecutively inhabit completely different genders, ages, and ethnicities. They must confront a new state of “play” where the distinction between the real and the virtual blurs and their true selves are called into doubt.

Transmediale // Steve Lambert

Here’s Bruce Sterling’s speech at Transmediale, a talk on “atemporality for the creative artist,” which explains what the net and technology have done to the idea of the history and the future.  This shit is deep…