networked worlds

To me, it’s very important to think about speculative fiction and worldmaking as two approaches for better orienting ourselves to the present, rather than conjuring escapist utopian futures that will never arrive.

The structural focus of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science fiction alike – science fiction that accounts for scientific accuracy and logic in the first instance, and for social or political systems in the second – is more easily translated to policy or innovation than any other genre of media. It provides a ready-made framework that runs all the way from... See more

The hefty tome of cross-references, which readers can navigate via one of the thematic paths outlined by sixteen notable cyberfeminists, or by using the entries like hyperlinks, has become an indispensable resource for historicizing the putting into practice of contemporary technology criticism.

Any study of worldbuilding would be remiss without mention of Biosphere 2, the experimental facility constructed in Arizona for studying the feasibility of life in a manmade ecosystem. In 1994, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo broke into the complex – or rather, attempted a break-out, and in the process brought the years-long experiment to an... See more

Ultimately it’s not just about what we make in the world, it’s the ways in which we remake ourselves that transforms the world around us. – Gaylene Gould

The magic of the internet is that it lets us build whole new societies on top of the existing one. These new, internet-led societies have repeatedly shown the power to evolve, push, and even overtake the physical society that created them (for good and for ill).

to create an AR application that would make the book into an interface. The performative reading is a way of simultaneously talking about and demonstrating new media. It was also a way of exploring the breaking points of tools: spreadsheets used as an index, rather than for data management; Unity (a gaming software) used to make a book into a... See more