Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

We have almost reached the state when the simulation of sports will practically seem as real as what is being simulated – maybe one or two generations of hardware to go, then we’re there. If you stand a couple meters away from the screens of current consoles, it’s already almost indistinguishable.

I’m asking myself whether this will have an actual effect on the various sports themselves, the weekly spectacles. Will they be strong enough to stay interesting when their consumers (the ones that usually watch them televised) can actually participate? Or is is more the unpredictability and debating an individual player’s performance over a beer that makes it so interesting? What about interactions between real and virtual as they already happen in heavily GCI-enhanced replays of penalty shots, would that also work inversely? What happened if real and virtual would perfectly blend in the future?

(PS. Yes, I do prefer Nintendo’s current approach as well, but then again I’m a real sucker for hyper-realism sometimes)

http://www.gwei.org

“Google Will Eat Itself announced that is now fully censored on all Google Search-Indexes worldwide. What a scandal!”

True, a search doesn’t yield their site, but over 40.000 others linking to them. Anyway, here’s one more.

Went to see Pan’s Labyrinth yesterday. Fantastic movie, but we just had to leave the cinema at some point (I went along, that is). A fantasy world’s horror mirrors the horrors of Spain in limbo between civil war and Franco’s dictatorship. A nightmarish monster, torture, euthanasia, murder, a creature being burned to death, death during childbirth – all in a few minutes, very graphic and with no break whatsoever in between.

Interesting to feel again the power of fiction and to see what happens when there’s no trace of comic relief in such kind of narrative – it just got too much. (Badly want to see how it ends, though)

Update: So we watched the end yesterday. Of course, we had left the cinema just before things changed a bit for the better, thus perfectly traumatizing ourselves. The ending is actually really smart, in a kind of biblical way. Resolution through self-sacrification, but in a way that leaves the question of what happened in the end (or possibly throughout the entire story) entirely to the audience. It elegantly creates a divide between story and history while at the same time joining them together even closer. I’d recommend you to watch it. Don’t take drugs before.

And: Guess who Doug Jones, who plays the Pale Man, is as well:

I wish I could say I’ve known it all along.

At the panel about the new photography at the Musée de l’Elysee last Saturday in Lausanne, two questions came up which I found really interesting and worth sharing:

Firstly, is there a profound difference between photography before and after Flickr, in terms of how the moment is treated? Traditionally, the idea of finding (or crafting) the perfect and decisive moment has been the idea behind taking a photograph. There are limited exposures and subjects are fleeting, so better use them well. Nowadays, many of the old-school people argue, photography as such has become an indifferent process in which an almost infinite number of photos can be taken and stored and every artistic decision is gone. Is that really true? I actually don’t think that the classic kind of photography is dead as you can see so many people on the net work aesthetically with their cameras. There is, however, a second kind of photography which appeared with photosharing and which follows its very own paradigm. This photography is the kind which is much closer to what Flickr actually introduced, which is that cameras become just as much tools of communication as they are tools of photography. Here. the moment is a slice in time and the metaphor related to the moment is more one of a stream of consciousness out of which we take impressions than isolated aesthetic products. Very sensibly, Flickr call this the photostream. It’s for that differentiation I feel that I need to maintain my different Flickr personalities, plugimi is more about the crafted moments whereas saschapohflepp is the stream of impressions that i want to share with the world.

The other interesting question was, whether a screenshot from Second Life would qualify as a photo. Another one of those SL-paradoxons. But, I’d rather argue for yes I think. It’s difficult to make a point for that, but as a virtual simulation where individuals have real encounters and interact with the world, a representation of it should count as a photo. Maybe it only comes full circle this way since digital photography is half virtual already if you argue from the standpoint of representation through data. Many people are feeding their photostreams already with shots from their second lives (often alternating with photos from their first life), which for Flickr increasingly poses the same question. So far, their answer is no, by the way.

On a totally different note: Has anyone ever researched about how *much* music actually is becoming part of our working reality only due to the fact that we work and listen on the same machine?

Via Boing Boing

Hung out in Second Life tonight with a few friends – thanks Aram for the invite, that was very interesting and inspiring.

During the discussion, Joachim Stein said something very interesting: that the introduction of space brings chance back into the digital world. Think about it: you can hardly e-mail anyone by chance, yet you can meet someone in the street because you happen to walk down the same street. You don’t have to have adresses or locators because your bodies share the same physical space and distances are varying. The same paradigm is being re-introduced in SL where you can quasi-physically bump into people by serendipity. Same might go for the introduction of information into physical space. When we are traceable in space, our informational personas suddenly get assigned a location and might miss each other by just a few meters (could proximity over time become a decisive factor when judging a relationship between users?).

I’m finding this particularly intriguing since it is very close to what I tried with time in Blinks & Buttons – using the informational traces of space and time to introduce links between people through serendipity.

Arrived yesterday, haven’t installed it yet. I think the idea is just wonderful and I really hope that lots of people will use this and thus make networks available where the telcos succeeded in persuading café-owners in charging 8 € per day. I really hate this pseudo South-American revolutionary attitude that they wrap the whole thing in, though.

I took some time today to play around with, or rather in Second Life. I actually went to the American Apparel store and bought some underpants since I was naked, somehow I had managed to lose all my clothes. It’s very well designed, kind of modernish. There’s even free beer (didn’t know what to do with it though).

I spent a few L$ on that and then went on exploring a bit more. I still don’t really know what to make of this, but I can’t really shake off this creepy feeling which SL gives me. On the one hand, it is truly amazing what people build and how much effort they put in there. As a whole, SL is probably the most astonishing thing around these days. On the other hand though, there’s so much weird things (and I mean really weird) around that it makes the whole thing like a giant dream to walk around it. It’s as if people use 3D and scripting to materialize some kind of collaborative subconscious and then charge you for renting real estate in there.

AA goes Bauhaus in SL

Interesting proposal

Need clothes

Much better