Screening Surveillance
Three short films set in the near future from the suitably ominous-sounding Surveillance Studies Centre. The Black Mirrorlets are:
- Blaxites,
- A Model Employee, and
- Frames.
Related links
Lena @ Things Of Interest
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
Science Fiction Doesn’t Have to Be Dystopian | The New Yorker
Ted Chiang has new collection out‽ Why did nobody tell me‽
Okay, well, technically this is Joyce Carol Oates telling me. In any case …woo-hoo!!!
Tellart | Design Nonfiction
An online documentary series featuring interviews with smart people about the changing role of design.
As technology becomes more complex and opaque, how will we as designers understand its potential, do hands-on work, translate it into forms people can understand and use, and lead meaningful conversations with manufacturers and policymakers about its downstream implications? We are entering a new technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and synthetic biology.
So far there’s Kevin Slavin, Molly Wright Steenson, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, with more to come from the likes of Matt Jones, Anab Jain, Dan Hill, and many, many more.
Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain - MIT Technology Review
A near-future sci-fi short by Hannu Rajaniemi that’s right on the zeitgest money.
The app in her AR glasses showed the car icon crawling along the winding forest road. In a few minutes, it would reach the sharp right turn where the road met the lake. The turn was marked by a road sign she had carefully defaced the previous day, with tiny dabs of white paint. Nearly invisible to a human, they nevertheless fooled image recognition nets into classifying the sign as a tree.
Related posts
Living Through The Future
William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
Nosediving
What’s the score?
Seams
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.