The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Earlier this week, the Second Life-focused blog Not Possible IRL had an interesting post on UCSD’s Sheldon Brown, Director of our Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and his ongoing project, the Scalable City.  The post, “Using game technology to explore the “unreality” of virtual landscapes,” includes a link to the trailer on Youtube for Sheldon’s project.

Scalable City - a project by Sheldon Brown and Experimental Game Lab - creates environments, from urban to rural, via a data visualization pipeline.

Now Scalable City has opened at one of my favorite museums in the whole wide world, The Exploratorium in San Francisco. As you move through the interactive exhibit, you literally “paint” the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. According to Sheldon’s website, “Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.”

Sheldon tells me that when he describes the project, the light bulb that goes off in people’s heads often displays itself in the form of comments like, “Oh, you mean like Second Life!”  In real life (pun intended), his project is a way of looking at second, third and fourth generations of the technologies that enable Second Life, in the near-term future when virtual reality worlds will be far more extensive, adaptable and available.  The next one in the pipeline appears to be Avatar Reality’s serendipitously named Blue Mars, blogged here and here this past February after being previewed at GDC 2008.

Last year’s Clarion class met with Sheldon one afternoon, in a first experiment at lab tours and conversations with faculty designed to develop relationships and see if anything interesting emerges.  This year, we’re regularizing the program a little more, setting such discussions for Friday afternoons between 3:30 and 5:00, one of the very few times during the Clarion Workshop that could be called “down time.” 

With thanks to the glorious Mr. Lewis Carroll, and in recognition perhaps of a renaissance in Carroll-ish strands within literary science fiction and fantasy, I point tonight to the marvelous blog post at the UK’s Guardian books site by 2008 Clarionite Damien G. Walter.  Damien, along with classmate Emily Jiang, is a respondent to this blog, something that the new blog etiquette requires me to disclose; their equally stunning classmates so far seem less forward (less interested perhaps?) as they prep for the crazed six-week phenomenon that is Clarion. 

Damien’s blog post heralds the excitement of the Mundane movement — a rather joyous dichotomy, this idea of a wondrous Mundane.  I won’t try to summarize the piece, because it makes its own case so well.  What strikes me as wondrous about the  post is the simple fact that the Mundane movement, for all its power, is but one of several tremendously important strands emerging from the literatures of science fiction and fantasy.  Whether you choose to focus on Geoff Ryman and the Mundane as Damien does, or Kelly Link and magical realism, or Jeff VanderMeer and the New Wierd, or Neil Gaiman and the intersticial storytelling that bridges between graphic novels, novels, young adult novels and film, and then back again, the world of science fiction and fantasy literatures is becoming as varied and exciting as the field of ‘Literatures in Spanish’ that replace the old Western-centric approach differentiating between Spanish literature and the novels of the so-called New World; or ‘Literatures in English’ that brings English (UK) Literature, American Literature and Caribbean literature in English together into a single topic. 

Damien’s piece announces the death of the starship and the birth of the mundane reality at the core of sf and fantasy.  (Okay, that’s a gross exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point here.)  I would argue that the starship, in partnership with the vampire and comic heroes such as Iron Man, live on and indeed reign supreme in the other media that reflect the sf and fantasy genres: film, television, the web.  They will continue to dominate in those genres well into the future, since the emerging ‘Literatures of SF/Fantasy’ have more power in the written word than in other media.

Meantime, where our past focus in the study of literature writ large was framed largely by the dichotomy between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ literatures, the emergence of so many powerful variants within sf and fantasy may herald a new age.  Where it goes, well, only time will tell.  Or time travel.

The Economist has a fabulous “Special Report” on mobile telecoms in the April 12, 2008 issue, “Nomads at Last.”  It’s about the rise of connectivity as virtually every form of IT and communication goes mobile:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel…. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The link above brings you to the first of seven articles in the report; you have to go through them one by one to read the entire report (note the The Economist: Web 2.o=free content).  The whole thing sounds a lot like the visions of Vernor Vinge, especially in “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” reviewed here on Ray Kurzweil’s website.  But it divides the analysis well; pay particular attention to the sixth story in, “A World of Witnesses,” on the democratic pressures that ubiquitous cameras and other digital artifacts will bring.  Great stuff.

Today’s New York Times asks that question in an article titled in my print edition, “Asking a Federal Judge to Save the Planet, and Maybe a Bit More “, and on their website, “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More“:

None of [today’s other news] will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

… Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

I know I’ve read sf novels with that as the premise.  My first question, of course, is whether the New York Times thinks losing the planet is “a bit” important or a “whole lot” important, and why their headline writer could come up with anything more descriptive than those two terms.  But on the same day that lawyers won a case returning copyright rights to the heirs of Superman’s creators, taking them back from corporate giant Time-Warner, anything is possible.

Pardon my riff on Pogo, but I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite possum while reading the Los Angeles Times‘ article this morning, “Reporting live from a cellphone near you …” It focuses on Bay Area start-up Qik.com, leading us to a “dystopian” future by letting “users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the web.”

 ”The worst moment in almost everybody’s life is going to be captured on film,” [Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity] said. “But if those bad moments can be avoided or we can learn from them, that’s going to be very powerful as well.”

Wait, hold the phone . . . optimism about constant mutual surveillance? How does that work? Well, mull it over and see if Calacanis’ view doesn’t start to make sense. The key is not to think of it in Orwellian terms, in which some unseen entity is monitoring your every move. Not that Big Brother couldn’t happen or that we shouldn’t be vigilant about its creeping up on us — but that’s a different story altogether. What I’m talking about here is Little Brother — since we’re the ones with the cameras….

Consider too that it might not be so bad, collectively, to have more of our unflattering moments out in the open. It seems to me that for a long time now, we’ve all been laboring under the Puritanical myth that to be good is to be perfect.

I’m not so sure that I agree with him on that, but certainly Little Brother seems a bigger threat than Big Brother at this point.  Especially when you think what then-rare video did in the Rodney King case, and jump to today’s New York Times piece on haggling, about the increasing ability of eBay-aware shoppers to negotiate prices downward in department, electronics and other chain stores, particularly as the recession deepens.  And it’s not just pricing information or police-brutality videos that are reshaping the power of the collective individual: at UC San Diego, we have a start-up technology in the works that will put real-time air-quality monitoring in the hands of cell phone users, allowing urbanites to track pollution levels in their neighborhoods and identify hotspots.

 The power of the ‘collective individual’: Childhood’s End, anyone? 

Masayuki Oshiai’s ‘Shutter’ is about to take the concept of  ‘director’s cut’ video releases of studio films to a whole new level.  Up to now, director’s cuts have been either the version the director would have released if only the weenies in the studio hadn’t cut the movie to shreds (Blade Runner); or the extended version desired by fanatics breathlessly seeking every moment of Christopher Lee’s Saruman performance (Lord of the Rings).

As described by Paul Brownfield in today’s LA Times , in an article on the film’s star Joshua Jackson, Ochiai’s ‘Shutter’ takes that concept one step further:

What makes it more than a popcorn movie for American audiences, says the film’s star, Joshua Jackson, is that its Japanese director, Masayuki Ochiai, simultaneously made a different cut of the film for Japanese audiences.
“The old paradigm is unraveling,” Jackson said. “That idea that you could make a movie that would have regionally specific cuts. I think that’s a really interesting idea.”

The cuts in this case include Japanese-language scenes left out of the American version, and changing the story-line to remove the evil connotations surrounding spirits that haunt the couple at the center of the film to better relate to Japanese culture’s respect for one’s ancestors.

Wikipedia lists seven different versions of Blade Runner, at least four of which seem to be available to the hungry fan willing to scrounge around eBay and Amazon.  If Ochiai’s starting a trend, how many more are we heading for?

An email has just floated in from Amazon announcing the ten finalists in its Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest — and one of them, The Prospect of My Arrival by Chicago’s Dwight Okita, is an SF novel. 

In Chicago of 2025, the experimental Pre-Born Project at the Infinity Medical Center has inserted the consciousness of a fetus into the unoccupied body of a 30-year-old man, who will visit seven Referrals before deciding whether he chooses to be born. In lesser hands, this odd premise might have veered into political diatribe or slapstick. Instead, the protagonist, called Prospect, takes the reader on an engrossing and moving journey into the meaning of life, filled with fresh observations and memorable characters. Addressing the reader with a voice that skillfully blends innocence and wisdom, this latter-day Candide discovers unexpected connections among his Referrals and lands in jeopardy that keeps the pages turning until its satisfying and touching conclusion.

Check it out, and if you like it, give it a vote.  Nice to see people taking the genre seriously.

UC San Diego Physics B.A. Philip Rosedale has decided to move up within Second Life, the virtual world his Linden Lab created, to make room for an experienced manager who can manage the world’s explosive growth:

Rosedale founded Second Life, the 3-D virtual world in which players can fly, look like rock stars and build their own palaces, as well as pursue less savory endeavors, in 1999. The fanciful role-playing game now has about 500,000 active users.

The virtual world grew rapidly over the last two years. The number of people who pay $9.95 or more for a premium membership (you can also use the site for free) nearly doubled to 93,219 in late 2007 from the year before. Corporate sponsors such as Nissan Motor Co., Dell Inc. and Best Buy Co. bought virtual land and set up shop in Second Life with the hope of marketing to its residents.

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has an interesting review of The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, the recent book by Catherine Winters.  It’s a nice take on where Second Life is, as we contemplate where it’s going.

A Los Angeles Times article on the upcoming release of “Iron Man,” the first film out of the new Marvel Studios, highlights the changing nature of ’story’ in film thanks to the ongoing digital revolution.  While of Marvel Comics’ most exciting characters – the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, the X-Men and others – are in the hands of other studios, how to leverage the company’s lesser known figures?  And perhaps more importantly, given the economics of moviemaking, ”why go into the movie-making biz now?”

Maisel said the question is the wrong one. “We’re not in the movie business, we’re in the ‘Iron Man’ business right now. Marvel owns the intellectual property. We have an Iron Man video game coming, the toys, the comics, we have an animated television show coming, a direct-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie last year. We’re going to have an Iron Man ride at an amusement park in Dubai in a few years. We have a different perspective.” 

Now there’s an interesting topic for a Comic-Con panel…

 Meanwhile, Gore Verbinski, of “Pirates of the Caribbean 3” fame, talks to the Business section of the Times about his move into gaming with “a secret project that would let him apply his creative vision to the games business.” Again, the nature of narrative itself is at the core of Verbinski’s approach:

After working seven years straight on five movies back to back, I picked up my game controller and started playing. I just was blown away by the potential. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I feel that we are on the brink of something phenomenal. It’s a completely different form of narrative than being told a story in the traditional sense. So all the narrative rules, although I enjoy them, you have to start throwing them away and say, “Wow, look at what you can do here in this world!”

It was just a couple of days ago that I mentioned the link between science fiction and science.  Now Newsweek has an interview with a UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist about his research on California’s Lake Mead that includes the following:

It may sound like the plot of an apocalyptic sci-fi flick, but Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist and climate expert at Scripps, says there’s a 50 percent chance that the manmade lake, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam located on the Colorado River 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, will be dry by 2021, or even sooner if climate changes continue as expected and water use is not curtailed.

This just a couple of weeks after Time had an article about the rash of apocalype movies hitting the market, “Apocalypse New,” including the following from Cloverfield’s J.J. Abrams:

One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. “Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears,” says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. “When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it’s a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up.”

Our real-world tools are enough any more in our search for either meaning, or predictability.  Science fiction works so much better.