This year’s Virtual Futures 2.0’11 conference was astonishingly productive, and the results of the new ideas discussed and new collaborations formed are still reverberating around the net, the media and the conference circuit. Hopefully I’ll be able to speak about some of those results in the near future; in the meantime, much of the conference is now available on video.
My opening lecture at VF is below:
Shortly before the conference, Amy McLeod from the Warwick Knowledge Centre interviewed me, mainly about skeuomorphs (the topic of the book I’m writing at present): the podcast of that interview is available here.
There was a lot more talk of skeuomorphs in my live chat, ‘Understanding the Virtual’, following the conference; you can read a somewhat truncated and edited-down transcript here. The actual event was invaded and eventually DoSed by 4chan, the guys who hacked Sarah Palin’s emails… it was quite an honour to get 4channed, but the real transcript is unprintable.
Rhizome.org picked up on the skeuomorph meme and published another version: Dan O’Hara on Skeuomorphs, JG Ballard, Transhumanism, and the “eradication of individual identity.
And archive video from the 1995 Virtual Futures conference is steadily being digitized and placed on the VF Vimeo channel: below is an interview conducted with me recently, which includes a large chunk of the archive footage of Stelarc’s legendary 1995 performance, in which I’m bobbing around in the background with an orange mohican, trying to fix the sound levels, whilst Stelarc waves his third arm about menacingly…