As the physical world degrades and so corrodes the credibility of institutions that enable consumption, the status quo in the global north goes virtual. Within a short time, we’ve witnessed a rapidly increasing capacity to design, simulate and conjure a virtual perception of reality with exactitude and definition. Our ability to simulate reality has come to match our ability to record it. We’re able to simulate and produce a photographic image of an object without any need for the object itself. The same goes for retouched images and the act of retouching. As a result, images no longer need to ...

Sabrina Ratté’s Activated Memory is a video based on animated photographs of different Montreal parks. Activated Memory is a journey through a serene landscape where the trees and fields are at once surreal and familiar. Through the use of video feedback, 3d animation and color manipulations, the pictures render a new kind of space, a virtual world where only fragments of “reality” subsist. Music composed by Roger Tellier-Craig.

Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.

The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future… Fleeing the excesses of ’90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality. Plagued by obsessive ...

What we know today as ‘the internet’ has historically been accompanied by a particular class of high-definition visions for its future. In this luminous world, a boundless 3D space, digital beings would interact through new forms of collectivity and partake in new modes of making, sharing, learning and trading. The idea of the metaverse—broadly defined as an always-online and persistent spatial virtual world—is being resurrected through a fundamental shift in digital infrastructure. This development includes the relatively recent advent of consumer-level technologies such as video game engines and immersive hardware, and is accelerated by a bearing within the games industry towards ...

Since their previous episode about AI (episode 2), the conversation around AI has exploded and gone viral. Dall-e mini memes proliferated everywhere utilizing Dall-E mini now known as Craiyon, a text prompt AI image generator. An artist utilizing AI won first place in an art context, and the New York Times wrote about it. With that has also come skepticism, criticism, and fear regarding AI. William Wiebe is an artist and researcher whose work deals with machine perception, and created a project called SMPLverse which utilizes a synthetic data set created by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms to translate facial ...

A virtual environment, with multiple levels, produced for Philadelphia’s Extra Extra Gallery. Tip: Also see Tabor Robak’s Mansion, another virtual environment created by the artist.

Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron Three, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2 part TV production is a science-fiction classic that explores the notion of a computer-generated other world, pre-dating The Matrix by 26 years. Since its original broadcast in 1973 it has rarely been seen and following increasing demand the Fassbinder Foundation have restored this remarkable film. Reader published to coincide with a two-part screening of Welt am Draht / World on a Wire (Parts I and II) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973), screening Sunday 31 March 2013.

The early days when digital games were new, harmless and niche are long gone. Today’s games can simulate battlefields, predict disaster, and crash markets. We are faced with a diversity of play and the ubiquity of games, making them not only a popular medium, but the leading medium of contemporary society. Based on the keynote lectures held at DiGRA2015, Diversity of Play provides a critical view on the current state of digital games from theoretical, artistic, and practical perspectives. With an interview with Karen Palmer and essays by Astrid Ensslin, Mathias Fuchs, Tanya Krzywinska, and Markus Rautzenberg, Diversity of Play explores the uncanny in games, ...

Flight Simulator is an ode to airplane mode. It celebrates the best part of air travel: peaceful solitude. Choose a destination, enable airplane mode, and enjoy.

On this Ep, NM is joined by *Civilization* publishers Lucas Mascatello and Richard Turley, as well as *Highsnobiety* Editor-in-Chief, Thom Bettridge to discuss “SELECT YOUR CHARACTER,” the style-centric site and media brand’s latest white paper, which explores the overlap between gaming, fashion, and realms of the real. Created in collaboration with Mascatello and Turley, the 136 page doc looks at the changing terms of luxury, scarcity, and even winning itself. CW: 6 Millen-Xers talking about gaming.

We welcome philosopher and social scientist Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, author of The Invention of Religion in Japan (2012), The Myth of Disenchantment (2017) and Metamodernism (2021). Among many other things, we talk about his work, modernity and its alleged departure from the supernatural, Mark Zuckerberg completely misreading Snow Crash, and how philosophy help us to live a live that it is worth living.