Unreal magazine by Ida_Inga

6 - 43

cool movies that you must watch

reality identity

116

are we in a dream ?

the mountain

giant hologram

day dreamin

miley cyrus: my gender identity is fluid

44 79 iden-

tity virtuality

80 - 117

reality virtuality

u l i e w a t a i

could this creepy robot be the answear to eternal life ?

COOL

YOU THAT must WATCH “The Matrix”

directed by Wachowski Brothers

reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality called “the Matrix”

“Astroboy”

directed by Osamu Tezuka (1963 tv series)

“Walking life”

directed by Richard Linklater

explores a wide range of philosophical issues including the nature of reality, dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life

at first dr Boynton enjoyed having his son back, however rejected the robot after realizing he could not grow up physically like a real human child

“Astroboy”

directed by David Bowers (2009 film)

“Animatrix”

directed by Koji Morimoto

details the backstory of the Matrix universe, including the original war between man and machines

“Ghost in the shell” directed by Mamoru Oshii

the overarching philosophical themes of the film include self-identity in a technologically advanced world

“Heaven’s Memo Pad”

directed by Katsushi Sakurabi (tv series) Alice is a hikikomori and a cracking genius

“A.I.”

directed by Steven Spielberg

set sometime in the future, A.I. tells the story of David, a childlike android uniquely programmed with the ability to love

K K

As many as a million young people in Japan are thought to remain holed up in their homes - sometimes for decades at a time. Why?

or Hide, the problems started when he gave up school. “I started to blame myself and my parents also blamed me for not going to school. The pressure started to build up”

he says. “Then, gradually, I became afraid to go out and fearful of meeting people. And then I couldn’t get out of my house.” Gradually, Hide relinquished all communication with friends and eventually, his parents. To avoid seeing them he slept through the day and sat up all night, watching TV. “I had all kinds of negative emotions inside me,” he says. “The desire to go outside, anger towards society and my parents, sadness about having this condition, fear about what would happen in the future, and jealousy towards the people who were leading normal lives.” Hide had become “withdrawn” or hikikomori. In Japan, hikikomori, a term that’s also used to describe the young people who withdraw, is a word that everyone knows.

When does your mental health become a problem? Tamaki Saito was a newly qualified psychiatrist when, in the early 1990s, he was struck by the number of parents who sought his help with children who had quit school and hidden themselves away for months and sometimes years at a time. These young people were often from middle-class families, they were almost always male, and the average age for their withdrawal was 15. It might sound like straightforward teenage laziness. Why not stay in your room while your parents wait on you? But Saito says sufferers are paralysed by profound social fears.

“They are tormented in the mind,” he says. “They want to go out in the world, they want to make friends or lovers, but they can’t.” Symptoms vary between patients. For some, violent outbursts alternate with infantile behaviour such as pawing at the mother’s body. Other patients might be obsessive, paranoid and depressed.

Otaku vs hikikomori An overlapping group of people with the hikikomori, otaku are “geeks” or “nerds”. They are known for their obsessions, especially manga cartoons and anime. “Otaku” is the formal word for “you” in Japanese - it’s thought that the term came about from the tendency of socially awkward manga fans to use over-formal language. In press coverage, both otaku and hikikomori have been linked with serious sex crimes. When Saito began his research, social withdrawal was not unknown, but it was treated by doctors as a symptom of other underlying problems rather than a pattern of behaviour requiring special treatment. Since he drew attention to the phenomenon, it is thought the numbers of hikikomori have increased. A conservative estimate of the number of people now affected is 200,000, but a 2010 survey for the Japanese Cabinet Office came back with a much higher figure - 700,000. Since sufferers are by definition hidden away, Saito himself places the figure higher still, at around one million. The average age of hikikomori also seems to have risen over the last two decades. Before it was 21 - now it is 32.

So why do they withdraw? The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there. One such force is sekentei, a person’s reputation in the community and the pressure he or she feels to impress others. The longer hikikomori remain apart from society, the more aware they become of their social failure. They lose whatever self-esteem and confidence they had and the prospect of leaving home becomes ever

Like many hikikomori, Matsu was the eldest son and felt the full weight of parental expectation. He grew furious when he saw his younger brother doing what he wanted. “I became violent and had to live separately from my family,” he says. One way to interpret Matsu’s story is see him as being at the faultline of a cultural shift in Japan. “Traditionally, Japanese psychology was thought to be group-oriented - Japanese people do not want to stand out in a group,” says Yuriko Suzuki, a psychologist at the National Institute for Mental Health in Tokyo. “But I think especially for the younger generation, they want

more terrifying. Parents are also conscious of their social standing and frequently wait for months before seeking professional help.

more individualised or personalised care and attention. I think we are in a mixed state.” But even hikikomori who desperately want to fulfil “I their parents’ plans for was very well them may find themmentally, but selves frustrated.

A second social factor is the amae - dependence - that characterises Japanese family relationships. Young women tramy parents ditionally live with their parents until marriage, and men may never move out pushed me the Andy Furlong, an academic of the family home. Even though about at the University of Glasgow way I didn’t half of hikikomori are violent towards specialising in the transition want to go” their parents, for most families it would from education to work, be unthinkable to throw them out. But in connects the growth of the exchange for decades of support for their hikikomori phenomenon children, parents expect them to show respect and w i t h the popping of the 1980s “bubble fulfil their role in society of getting a job. economy” and the onset of Japan’s recession of Matsu became hikikomori after he fell out with the 1990s. his parents about his career and university course. It was at this point that the conveyor belt of good What about the girls? school grades leading to good university places leading to jobs-for-life broke down. A generation Hikikomori are seen as predominantly male of Japanese were faced with the insecurity of shortTamaki Saito says males occupy 70%- 80% of the term, part-time work. And it came with stigma, group. However, an internet survey by NHK found not sympathy. Job-hopping Japanese were called just 53% to be male. “freeters” - a combination of the word “freelance” and the German word for “worker”, arbeiter. In poFemale withdrawal into the home seems so natural litical discussion, freeters were frequently bundled to Japanese society that it may remain unreporttogether with “neets” - an adopted British acronym ed, speculates Andy Furlong at the University of meaning “not in education, employment or trainGlasgow. ing”. Neets, freeters, hikikomori - these were ways of describing the good-for-nothing younger gener“I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me ation, parasites on the flagging Japanese economy. the way I didn’t want to go,” he says. “My father is an The older generation, who graduated and slotted artist and he runs his own business - he wanted me to into steady careers in the 1960s and 1970s, could do the same.” not relate to them. But Matsu wanted to become a computer programmer in a large firm - one of corporate Japan’s army “The opportunities have changed fundamentally,” says of “salarymen”. Furlong. “I don’t think the families always know how “But my father said: ‘In the future there won’t be a to handle that.” society like that.’ He said: ‘Don’t become a salaryman.’” A common reaction is for parents to treat their

recalcitrant son with anger, to lecture them and make them feel guilty for bringing shame on the family. The risk here is that - as with Hide - communication with parents may break down altogether. But some mental attitude was just like a hikikomori, but now parents have been driven to extreme measures. For a time one company they’re more open and honest with themselves. So as operating in Nagoya could be hired by parents to burst into their chil- their child I’m very happy to see them change.” dren’s rooms, give them a big dressing down, and forcibly drag them Many parents of hikikomori visit the ibasho even away to a dormitory to learn the error of their ways. though their children may never be well Kazuhiko Saito, the director of the psychiatry department at enough to come with Kohnodai Hospital in Chiba, says that sudden interventions them. even by healthcare professionals - can prove disastrous. Yoshiko’s son with“I think my son “In many cases, the patient becomes violent towards the staff or the drew from society parents in front of the counsellors, or after the counsellors have very gradually when is losing the left,” he says. power or desire he was 22. Kazuhiko Saito is in favour of healthcare professionals visiting hikikomori, but he says they must be fully briefed on the patient, who must know in advance that they are coming.

to do what he wants to do”

Hikikomori - just a Japanese thing? Hikikomori has entered the Oxford English Dictionary as “In Japan: abnormal avoidance of social contact”. But Saito Tamaki believes it is also a problem in Korea and Italy. After a 2002 BBC documentary, Saito received a flurry of emails from British parents who said their children were in a similar condition. Andy Furlong points out that young people in Western societies frequently “take time out” in gap years or have “false starts” on careers or courses without attracting stigma. He adds that the preconditions for a hikikomori-like problem are falling into place in Europe, with 50% youth unemployment in some countries, forcing young people to continue living at home. In any case, the do-nothing approach has been shown not to work. Tamaki Saito likens the hikikomori state to alcoholism, in that it is impossible to give up without a support network. His approach is to begin with “reorganising” the relationship between the patient and his parents, arming desperate mothers and fathers with strategies to restart communication with their children. When the patient is well enough to come to the clinic in person he can be treated with drugs and therapy. Group therapy is a relatively new concept to Japanese psychology, but self-help groups have become a key way of drawing hikikomori into wider society. For both Hide and Matsu, the journey to recovery was helped by visiting a charity-run youth club in Tokyo known as an ibasho - a safe place for visitors to start reintroducing themselves to society. Both men have made progress in their relationships with their parents. Matsu has been for a job interview as a computer programmer, and Hide has a part-time job. He thinks that by starting to talk again with his parents, the whole family has been able to move on. “They thought about their way of life in the past and in the future,” he says. “I think that before - even though they were out working - their

longer years old.

At first he would go out to buy shopping, but she observes ruefully that internet shopping means this is no longer necessary and he no leaves the house. He is now 50

“I think my son is losing the power or desire to do what he wants to do,” she says. “Maybe he used to have something he wanted to do but I think I ruined it.”

AR EW EA PP RO AC HI A NG GE N Y ID EN TI TY CR IS IS ? What does a good life, and a good career, look like for a generation of disillusioned social media execs?

Last week, a friend of mine posted a telling comment beneath an article I’d linked to on Facebook (a review of a book that urges us to temper the time we spend on social networks with more, and better, face to face contact). “I’d be off here in a heartbeat if I’d not somehow managed to build a career out of being on it.” My response? “And that’s why our entire generation is pretty much fucked.” An arch throwaway comment. Except it wasn’t. Not really.

I hit puberty during the Western middle-classes’ first flush of love with the World Wide Web. I have been one of its moistest-lipped, driest-eyed maenads ever since I realised that my father’s vast grey Gateway?—?when helmed by that grumbling, burping wizard they called AOL?—?could bear me away to thousands of lush isles, each one harbouring a lawless tribe that thrived on comic books and trashy American sci-fi and generally anything that didn’t go down too well in a mid-nineties Oxfordshire all-girls’ school. Eager to continue my commitment to cliché, I began my adult life as a failed and anorexic actress in London, honing skills that were to put me in excellent stead for future digital-native-success: a devotion to isolation; an induction into the heady joys of perfectionism and control; disassociation from my body; fetishisation of my mind; and a rigorous training in offering more digestible versions of myself to a vague, omnipotent and tantalisingly glamorous authority.

I grew healthy and strong. I learned how to love, and allow myself to be loved; that taught me to value not only the rich, irreducible complexity of what it means to be me, but the rich, irreducible complexity of what it means to be someone else. Maybe you’re convinced that you’re about to become the hero of your own life by finally hitting on that instantly scalable startup, or finishing that conveniently filmic fantasy. Maybe, in the heat of your conviction, you jump up from your chair, have a good stretch, make a coffee, then spend an hour leaning against the kitchen counter, browsing Instagram.

I read with sharpening hunger, the words of a No, growing collection of thinkers who are hang Joshua Ferris; technologists such as Jaron Lanier on, that’s and Nicholas Carr; psychologists such as Susan me again. Pinker and Sherry Turkle; philosophers such as Matthew Crawford and Alain de Botton. B u t I’m And I admitted that I am, in fact, not just a person but a woman. That I like being a woman. And that I don’t have to learn to code in order to earn the right to question the design of my world. Maybe you have a job that involves responding to emails for the majority of the day. Maybe you hate Facebook, love Twitter and don’t understand Snapchat. Maybe you bitch about couples who sit silently behind their phones in restaurants, then spend your evening slumped on the sofa second-screening Game of Thrones.

In 2006, I became a social media marketer, although back then the term was yet to be invented; the job description Maybe you gobble positive psychology and was for a copywriter, because my boss figured that the self-development books like The Happiness future lay in the hands of nerds who were good at using Hypothesis and The 4 Hour Work Week. Maybe (written, not spoken, obvs) words to woo other nerds. I you check your devices first thing in the morning also became a writer,. and last thing at night and, when you turn them off on holiday, maybe you get ill.

By starting a WordPress blog and pitching ideas to editors, who knew a ripe young piece of troll-bait when they saw one. I grew with the industry. I taught blue-chips how to use ‘emotional triggers’ to develop ‘authentic’ relationships with their ‘communities.’ I became something of an athlete at churning out 6–800 words on Twitter and books, Facebook and fashion, sensuality and Snapchat. I gave speeches around the world on innovation and business; the token double-X chromosome on the stage, dropping the f-bomb from behind my coy smile and good hair. And then, at the grand age of thirty-two, I — Well, I suppose I grew up.

Tossing my hardware into the Thames and pulling a Walden is not a viable option, however lovely my Pinterest board of Orkney bothies has become. That would be an escape, not an answer. I don’t want to be a dinosaur, but nor do I want to be a drone. Istill believe that social technologies can be an incredible force for good, not to mention fun. But I also think it’s time we started looking seriously, and publicly, at the unsustainable assumptions that underpin them, and the toll they take on our identities and our world.

What does a good life, and a good career, look like for a generation of lonely professional networkers, bored social media executives and cyber-shamed digital gurus? A generation whose experiences have been relentlessly curated by corporations, and whose personal lives are barely extricable from their personal brands? Might there even be a way for such a generation to use the schizophrenic perspective and bizarre skills this era has given them to improve it from within? Hmm.

Fatima

Raised by resistance

fighters

during the invasion of Kuwait, Fatima

Al Qadiri now makes ice-cold electron-

ica in the US. But she is still haunted by bombs and blazing oil wells. 18

“I believe in djinns,” says Fatima Al Qadiri. “I believe in evil spirits that haunt the earth. I don’t smell or see them, but I feel them – especially in Kuwait: it’s one of the most haunted places on earth. Even with all the concrete and highways and esplanades. It’s very creepy. We have Greek ruins in Kuwait. Alexander the Great built sacrificial temples on one of our islands. I always feel some kind of dread there. Even inside my house. It takes me hours to get to sleep. And music is a kind of ghost too: it’s about conjuring memories, apparitions, something that reminds you of your past.”

Yet it’s hard to talk to Al Qadiri for any length of time without the spectres and demons of old Kuwait leaking into the conversation. “Kuwait in the 1980s was a utopia. It was extremely comfortable and sheltered. I constantly had a feeling of it as sublime: the country is very flat, the sky is huge, and the buildings very low, so you’re always looking up into this expanse. And, like the majority of middle-class Kuwaitis, I’d go to London every summer to escape the 50-degree heat. I’d go to Woolworths to buy candy and comic books. Andy Capp!”

Everything changed on 2 August 1990. “I woke to watch a Japanese cartoon dubbed into Arabic and suddenly a black-and-white film kicked in. Some guy I’d never heard of: Saddam. I remember thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’ I didn’t even know the word occupation.” Iraq had just begun its invasion and, over the next seven months, more than 1,000 Kuwaitis were killed and 300,000 fled the country.

Al Qadiri

It’s odd to be talking about ghosts and revenants with Al Qadiri. After all, we’re sitting inside PS1, MoMA’s contemporary art hub in Long Island City, New York, that’s meant to be an incubator for newness. And Al Qadiri, born in Senegal in 1981, is herself often seen as an icon of newness: she makes and curates conceptually inclined, drily satiric art; she’s written for influential art and fashion journals Bidoun, Frieze and DIS; she’s one of a growing band of producers – among them Holly Herndon, Laurel Halo, Maria Minerva – who have made waves in what often seems like the Boys Own world of international electronica.

Al Qadiri’s parents stayed and, at great risk to their lives, joined the resistance. “My mother would distribute forbidden newsletters by wearing an abaya – which she would never normally do – and pretending to be pregnant, so she could conceal the leaflets on her body. On one occasion she was stopped at a checkpoint where one of the soldiers told her, ‘There is an occupation, but you Kuwaitis are still fucking like rabbits.’ If she’d been detected, she’d have been shot dead on the spot. “All the phone lines were monitored by the Iraqi police. My father was once half an hour late to a meeting and when he arrived everybody at the safe house had already been murdered. Our family was moving from house to house almost every week, but still my father was eventually a prisoner of war. He was taken from our house to a concentration camp in Basra for a month.” Al Qadiri says it was this period of conflict and chaos, of everyday extremism, that helped “There’s a strong give birth to bond between lanthe music – icy, machinic, almost guage and national post-human – she identity, but my educurrently makes. cation was very Eng“Kuwait was burned lish and colonial. to the ground. It was I felt an outsider. I an ashtray nation. In that alien landalways felt lost” scape, I’d wake up and see the illuminated darkness that was the daytime burning of the oil wells. The black sky was lit by the sun. I felt I was living in a sci-fi movie, as if I was in Blade Runner. You’d hear machinegun fire, air-raid sirens. After I moved to America, it took me years to get over my fears about fireworks on the fourth of July. They sounded like bombs falling.” For Al Qadiri, not yet a teenager and increasingly unable to leave bed or attend school, video games became a lifeline. “Me and my young sister played them during and after the war. Even Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf! We were lords of the universe in video games. We had power. They were an alternative universe where we could react against traumatic adult

reality. We could escape. And the music was so hypnotic! Little 8-bit melodies that lulled you into a waking sleep while playing the games.” Living in a ravaged nation about which few westerners cared (French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, critiquing postmodern society’s cult of the spectacle, claimed the Gulf war had not actually taken place; most TV footage focused on the Allied bombing of Baghdad rather than daily reality for Kuwaitis) and often retreating into the virtual and electronic worlds of gaming, Al Qadiri felt increasingly out of time and place. “There’s a strong bond between language and national identity, but my education was very English and colonial. I felt an outsider. I always felt lost, inferior, supremely alienated by Arabic. The written version of it is like Chaucer’s English. Reading comic books in Chaucer’s English is a mindfuck! I thought Arabic was bizarre, dusty, absolutely irrelevant. It gave me a continuous identity crisis until I studied linguistics and found the magical word ‘triglossic’.” This means the existence of different varieties of a language in different situations: so Arabic, for instance, can exist in modern, journalistic fashion as much as in more classical variants. “It was like unlocking the biggest puzzle of my life. Later, when text-messaging came into play, I was like, ‘Woah!’” Al Qadiri felt equally out of place when she moved to America. “I thought the country would be like Saved By the Bell or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and that everybody had bleached teeth, good hair, and smelled of Gio Armani. I landed at Penn State University, which is right next to the state penitentiary and has the largest fraternity system in the world. I had one millimetre of orange hair, blue contact lenses and a giant orange fake-fur coat. I really looked like an alien. When I told people I came from Kuwait, they’d reply, ‘What state is that?’ I lasted one semester.” Nations as mythologies, as fantasies, as erratic aggregations of commerce, junk-media, fabricated fictions: all these feed into Al Qadiri’s debut album Asiatisch. Its title is derived from the German word for Asia, but it’s actually about the concept of China. Song titles such as Shanghai Freeway, Hainan Island and Szechuan may reference real places, but the use of synthesised voices and digital snares alongside “traditional” gongs and bells, the

toggling between classical poetry and nonsensical Mandarin, and the creation of a moodscape that moves seamlessly between cheesy, eerie and darkly erotic suggest that Al Qadiri is more interested in Chinas of the mind.

says Al Qadiri. “The China on this record would be brutalist architecture … made of jade. There’s something very dainty and delicate about my melodic compositions, but they are made by digital tools, which also render them clunky, cold.”

“I’ve never been,” she says unapologetically. “The record is trying to posit a notion of an imagined China. This imagined China is for me something that has been brewing for centuries. It started with the opium wars. It’s like a garbage tapestry: you don’t know what the fab-

The record bears the imprint of grime, especially a fleeting micro-genre of it christened “sinogrime” that circulated as a mix CD put together by Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, the boss at Al Qadiri’s label Hyperdub. “Grime immediately hit me in the gut,” she recalls. “I felt it was the most futuri s t i c music I’d ever heard. The

ric is; it’s not something most macho genre of that’s easily identifiable or western music. It quantifiable; there’s a catalogue was martial! The of films and cartoons and comic most apocalypbooks within it, but one that tic and the most many authors have conchildlike music! And “We were lords of tributed to. The Asia in as a child who’d lived the universe in video Asiatisch is a nexus of stethrough the apocalypse, games. We had power. reotypes that have been it resonated with me. They were an alternaperpetrated, elaborated, And as a videogame fan, I tive universe where embellished and weaved, knew some of the earliest each time further and grime tracks were recordwe could react against further dislocated ed using PlayStations.” traumatic adult realifrom the original ty. We could escape.” misrepresentaWhat’s striking about a lot of tion.” art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf This sounds rather states in particular, is its like Edward Said’s concept of relative lack of interest orientalism which, in his celebrated in tradition, reverence, 1978 study, he characterised as a “cultural apparatus continuity – all values that the that is all aggression”. But where Said saw himself w e s t foists on other cultures. In her as a debunker and exposer of those phoney versions 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, of the east peddled by novelists, historians and dipQatar-born film-maker Sophia Al-Maria, who has lomats, there’s little sense of protest in Asiatisch. collaborated with Al Qadiri in the past, elaborates Al Qadiri doesn’t claim – or perhaps even seek – to on her “Gulf futurism” theory: “If you think of hisstand outside of that “nexus of stereotypes”. “I don’t tory as something defined by the laws of physics, know the real China,” she says. “Only the China the and the discovery of gas and oil wealth as a sort of west has been feeding me: this elaborate, simulated event horizon from which there is no going back … roadtrip through virtual China that has been develwhat’s happened is a wormhole stargate mindfuck.” oped over centuries.” The scale and intensity of the warp-speed modernThe China that Al Qadiri creates isn’t a source of isation programmes in so many Gulf states – their ancient wisdoms. It is thrilling, hyper-sleek, as glissteel-and-glass citadels under baking hot suns, their tening, eager to delight and designed to ensnare as labour camps full of imported labourers from Asia a shopping mall or the duty-free concourses of a – are perhaps better chronicled by science fiction, modern airport. It’s an emerald city, a sci-fi wondervideo games and HD entertainment than by more land, a themepark simulation of China – a utopia traditional forms of journalism or sociology. “There’s that, like all utopias, doesn’t exist. Or should that be been a generational quantum leap in Kuwait,” says a replicant China? “I always think in architecture,” Al Qadiri. “The houses are not made of mud any

more, but of concrete. People don’t sleep on the roofs of their houses. There’s AC. “My grandmother would get water from the well, waking up at 5am so that nobody would see her and so that her honour wouldn’t be in question. Then she’d come back before anyone else had “And as a child woken up. She was illiterate, who’d lived like most women of her genthrough the apoceration. The idea of going to a university in America, as alypse, it resonatI did, was alien. She thought ed with me. And as white people were demons, a videogame fan, I blue-eyed devils, thought knew some of the they were djinns and evil earliest grime spirits. Then my parents saw the transformation tracks were refrom a medieval lifestyle corded using Playto a nation state. My generStations.” ation went one step further: many of us studied or moved abroad. Now the majority of the Gulf population is under 24. It’s a very youthful area.” Navigating the circuits of the international art world, making formally bold, genre-splicing, electronic music, being part of a two-man, two-woman production unit suggestively titled Future Brown (named after a metallic version of that colour that doesn’t exist naturally), Al Qadiri might seem to be an ambassador for future-lust amnesia. But certain memories can’t be wished away. Memories of arrests and disappearances, of dystopias and ashtray nations, blood in the desert, lingering apparitions. They lie, seething and barely suppressed, beneath the super-flat surfaces of her music.

COOL

YOU THAT shoul d READ

“Adventure time and philosphy” by Nicolas Michaud

“Adventure Time and Philosophy” will upset everything you thought you knew about life, the universe, and burritos

“Post Internet Survival Guide” by Katja Novitskova

a guide to the ecology of a severe ongoing merging of matter, social and (visual) information in the present world

“The Castle”

by Franz Kafka

K. arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle

“Neuromancer”

by William Gibson

the novel tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to pull off the ultimate hack

“No game no life” (manga) by Yu Kamiya

Sora and Shiro are two hikikomori step-siblings who are known in the online gaming world as Blank, an undefeated group of gamers

“Simulacra and Simulation”

by Jean Baudrillard

known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simul- taneous existences)

REPLACES REAL LIFE

Should elaborate fantasies be considered a psychiatric disorder?

WHEN

When I was 8 years old I had a game I liked to play in my front yard in suburban New Jersey. My siblings were older and mostly out of the house, my parents worked long hours, and when there was nothing much to do, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d walk in circles while shaking a piece ofWW string, daydreaming about Little House on the Prairie or The Brady Bunch. One afternoon I created an episode where, instead of going to Hawaii where dangerous spiders lurk, the Bradys went to the Bahamas, where Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just spent a week with my family. Greg Brady met my teenage sister there, and they started dating. The show playing in my head was so detailed and entertaining that it lasted 45 minutes. Another day, I imagined myself as the actress who played the seventh Brady sibling. I met all the other young actors on the set, and they commented on my cute outfit and amazing acting skills.A few years later, my neighbors saw me pacing with my string and gave me a weird look. I moved my game behind my bedroom door, hiding my imaginings from everyone, including my parents, who believed I had outgrown the activity. Eventually I learned to daydream without moving.

That’s when the game I played only when I was bored turned into something all-consuming. I had friends and did well in my classes, and I knew that the characters and stories in my head weren’t real, so I knew I wasn’t insane. But something was wrong with me. Daydreaming was taking over more and more of my life. It was as if I’d lost the remote control and the TV set in my head was running constantly, never turning off.

Later, in the early 1980s, psychologists Cheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber coined the expression “fantasy-prone” to describe people who spent much of their time “in a world of their own making.” Eric Klinger, a University of Minnesota psychologist who has spent years studying mind-wandering, reports that daydreaming accounts for about half of the average person’s thoughts, amounting to about 2,000 segments a day.

I remember being in grade school and feeling pleased that I no longer needed to wait until I got home to watch my favorite soap opera. If I wanted to see Luke

All this would have given me great comfort, except those kinds of daydreams were not my kinds of daydreams. There was no label for what I was

from General Hospital come back from the dead and reunite with his girlfriend, Holly, I could watch that reunion in my head, right there in class, and no one would ever know—unless the tears started to flow, in which case I would look around, anxiously praying that none of my classmates had noticed.

experiencing until 2002, when Eli Somer, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, coined the phrase “maladaptive daydreaming.” He defines it as “extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning.” But most psychologists have never heard of maladaptive daydreaming, and it is not officially recognized as a disorder. Many scoff at the idea that a normal activity like fantasizing could cause such distress. So how can people who believe t h e i r d a yd r e a m i n g is out of control receive help? Is maladaptive daydreaming a syndrome in itself, or is it just one manifestation of another affliction? Where does it come from, and how can it be cured? Most of all, how can the syndrome become better known so excessive fantasizers don’t feel like I did, the only person in t h e world t o

When I went to sleep-away camp one summer, I wondered why I couldn’t just immerse myself in the world around me. If a camp friend told a funny joke, I would find a way to incorporate it into one of my stories, and if a song came on the radio, it would remind me of one of my inner adventures. If I got a good part in the play, I would imagine that an actor on my favorite show had a daughter in the same play and came to watch all of my rehearsals. My life was good the way it was. Why couldn’t it be just for me? Why did my characters have to go with me everywhere I went and share in all of my experiences? It was as if I’d lost the remote control and the TV set in my head was running constantly, never turning off. My mom was a therapist, and my dad was a doctor, so we had a copy of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on our bookshelf. When I was 12, four years into my obsessive daydreaming, feeling terribly alone, I scanned the entire volume, hoping to find a description of my problem. No luck. If I’d been interested in reading about ordinary daydreaming, I would have had plenty of places to turn. In a 1907 paper, Sigmund Freud wrote glowingly about the human obsession with fantasy: “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?” Carl Jung promoted a technique called active imagination, a kind of meditation practice that involved dialoguing with imaginary figures or characters from dreams.

spend as much time as possible in my imaginary world? By

they went to jail for a double homicide they didn’t commit. I tried to pay attention in school, but unless it was something I truly loved, like drama class, I mostly failed. Somehow I managed to teach myself what I needed to know the night before the tests, and I would ace them, but up until then I would have little idea what we were covering.

the time I was a high school senior, I was as stressed as I’d eve r been, not about getting into college or orchestrating the perfect social life, but about straddling two worlds: real life and the stories I’d imagine. First thing every morning I’d visit the General Hospital in my mind. Throughout the day, I’d continue creating new plot lines and interacting with the characters during any free moment. I would pretend the young daughter of Robert, the police commissioner, and Anna, the spy, had grown into a teenage mini-spy who would get into all sorts of adventures, just like her parents. She was popular, and a fashion icon, like

I wanted to be. She could take down a bad guy with one swift kick. I spent every minute on a l e r t , waiting for moments when my friends and teachers would not notice and I could take a peek at my show. I’d even ask them questions that I knew would have long answers, so I could be where I really wanted to be—with my characters. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I couldn’t fall back asleep because the stories kept spinning along. The people I’d meet in real life couldn’t compare with my characters, who were more attractive and fascinating, who could make m e cry when their foster parents adopted them o r wh e n

After a while, I decided I couldn’t live like this anymore. Having spent almost a decade leading a secret, imaginary life, I decided to ask my parents for help. If anyone could tell me what was happening, they could, right? When I finally told them, they tried hard not to laugh and assured me I was normal. “This isn’t just daydreaming,” I tried to explain. “It’s like hours and hours, every minute of my life. I can’t care about anything in reality, because I am so caught up in this.” At my insistence, they took me to three therapists during my senior year. Two of them told me that I was creative and that my daydreaming was a special talent. The third acknowledged my pain and put me on Prozac, but that did nothing except make me nauseous and, frankly, a little scared. What if my characters evaporated? I’d be lonesome, having to rely on my human friendships, which frankly weren’t as strong as they used to be. But I had no need to worry about that—no matter how hard I willed myself to stop visiting Port Charles so frequently, I couldn’t.

In college, I spent my few non-daydreaming hours searching psychology databases, trying to find any evidence of someone like me. I made a lot of close friends and had a few boyfriends, but I found it tiring to keep up with their conversations while watching TV in my mind. I found myself gladly leaving their company (even if I was

still in their presence) to visit my plotlines. I made it through Harvard Law School, in part by imagining myself teaching my television characters about torts and stipulations. No one else knew how hard and exhausting it was to merge my coursework with my fantasy world. Finally, in my mid-20s, worn out by trying to balance my job as an advocate for domestic violence victims with the shows in my mind, I found relief. A psychiatrist prescribed me Fluvoxamine, an anti-depressant known to help with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which had affected some members of my family. It worked wonders in controlling the daydreaming. In stressful periods,

Psychotherapy. The paper examined six subjects who daydreamed excessively. Unlike me, they were victims of abuse and were unable to function well socially or in the workplace. But I had struggled with coordination difficulties and a painful constellation of autoimmune conditions, all of which went undiagnosed for years, so my poor health—like other people’s abusive circumstances—may have made fantasy more compelling than real life. I was especially intrigued that most of Somer’s subjects moved in idiosyncratic ways when they daydreamed, just as I had. “When I daydream,” one subject reported, “I often hold an object in my hand, say, an eraser or a

when my characters started to steal my attention, I’d up my dose a bit and regain my focus on real life.

marble. I toss [it] in the air. This tive monotone movement helps me

More than 10 years later, when the daydreaming no longer bothered me, I heard that a friend’s daughter was also walking in circles and making up stories in her head. Had I finally found someone who was just like the childhood version of myself? My friend’s stories inspired me to find out whether any obsessive daydreamers had found each other, now that I could

use the Internet, which hadn’t existed when I was researching this in my youth. I stumbled across an article on an Indian parenting website about an 8-year-old girl who couldn’t stop daydreaming. The article was filled with helpful tips for parents under the heading “How to reduce your child’s tendency to wander off,” but what struck me most was the long comment thread underneath the main story. Various readers chimed in to describe themselves as “addictive daydreamers” and ask for help. I’d spent my life looking for someone like me, and now I read about dozens of them who spent hours each day pacing, enthralled by their favorite stories. I was amazed to learn that I wasn’t alone. A few clicks later, I came across Somer’s research in The Journal of Contemporary

repeti-

concentrate on the fantasy.” After discovering this research, I convinced my psychiatrist, Jesse Rosenthal, to write an anonymous case study of me, working with Hunter College researcher Cynthia Schupak. I had to wean myself off my medication temporarily in order to allow Malia Mason, a researcher at Columbia University, to administer a functiona l magnetic reso-

nance imaging test to show which parts of my brain were active during daydreaming. The test showed great activity in the ventral striatum, the part of the brain that lights up when an alcoholic is shown images of a martini. “Frankly it was super strong,” Mason said. To her, it suggested that I not only got pleasure from daydreaming, but that the behavior was reinforced, becoming even more pleasurable in a feedback loop, much as you’d see with a drug addict. In 2011 I worked with Schupak again, this time as a coauthor on a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and Cognition. Looking at

90 excessive daydreamers, we found that 80 percent of them reported kinesthetic activity such as moving in circles, pacing, or rocking while they daydreamed. Twenty-three of the subjects said they had sought counseling for their fantasizing, but none had found a medical professional who took his or her problem seriously. I’m now working on a new study with Somer and two other researchers, Daniela Jopp of the University of Lausanne and Jonathan Lehrfeld of Fordham University, where I earned my masters degree in developmental psychology. This time we’re examining 340 daydreamers who get far more absorbed in fictional characters and plots than the general population does. The people in our study are troubled by their habit and their inability to control it. This, more than anything else, defines maladaptive daydreaming. Will maladaptive daydreaming ever end up in the DSM? Each edition of the manual contains new afflictions. In the most recent version, hoarding and skin picking made an appearance for the first time, as a part of obsessive-com-

pulsive disorder. For people who suffer from these conditions, this means they can now receive treatment and insurance reimbursement for behaviors that were previously considered odd but not pathological. But decades pass between new editions, and dozens, if not hundreds, of studies are required before disorders are approved. In the case of maladaptive daydreaming, it’s still not clear if the syndrome is an unreported part of another already-recognized disorder. Many people who lose themselves in imaginary worlds also report some symptoms of obsessive thinking or

ADHD. There’s also another subset of attention disorders, called Sluggish Cognitive Tempo, that includes excessive daydreaming, as well as fogginess and drowsiness. But people with this condition do not seem anywhere near as focused on their daydreaming, nor do they consider it addictive. Stereotypic Movement Disorder (SMD), which is in the DSM, also has some features in common with maladaptive daydreaming: It involves repetitive motions like hand flapping or head banging, often accompanied by vivid mental imagery. In a 2010 journal article titled “Stereotypic Movement Disorder: Easily Missed,” Roger Freeman, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, focused on 42 children whose parents

or teachers were concerned about their unusual repetitive motions. When the kids were asked what they were doing, 83 percent said they were repeating stories in their heads. This sounds very much like the early phases of my own maladaptive daydreaming. What’s more, 38 percent of the children in Freeman’s study had Developmental Coordination Disorder, which includes problems with fine motor coordination; this was certainly a huge impediment in my childhood. Freeman says it would be interesting to study children with SMD into adulthood, to see which factors fade over the years (perhaps the movement) and which kinds of children are likely to have long-lasting symptoms. He’d also like to know if the movements are more or less troublesome when they’re accompanied by fantasy. But Freeman says there may be an ethical problem with treating SMD. The children in his

study reported enjoying their unusual movements and the thoughts that came along with them. In their cases, their parents and teachers were the only ones who were worried by the syndrome. “Many of the children were already creative,” Freeman notes. “Do we want to stamp out creativity or not?” In academic circles, I have heard this question before, and encountered quite a bit of skepticism. “What aspect of normal human behavior are we going to pathologize next?” one researcher asked me. When asked if he felt maladaptive daydreaming should be considered a pathology, Klinger, the University of Minnesota psychologist, drew an insightful analogy. “If you’re running a fever, that’s generally considered pathology. It’s just an extreme example of a normal defense mechanism of the body,” he said. Excessive daydreaming could be a normal process that goes out of bounds. “It’s pathological insofar

as it’s injurious.” Would there be any potential downside to calling maladaptive daydreaming a pathology? “Only in a sense in that if you call it a pathology, you’re looking for a very specific concrete kind of cure, and that tends to be a pharmaceutical cure,” Klinger replied. “It’s not as productive as it would be if you handle it on a behavioral basis.” Many people who have intense, plot-rich daydreams function well at work and in relationships, he noted. And for those who don’t function well, it could be productive to tackle the themes and conflicts that come up consistently in their daydreams, resolving those issues through therapy. For some people who have difficulties limiting their daydreams, therapy and other forms of behavior modification may work well; it’s certainly true that not everyone who is troubled by excessive fantasies should be medicated. But for me, as well as for many others online, traditional talk therapy couldn’t stop the relentless pull of my imagination. I may be rare in having found a medication that relieves my obsession. So far, though, there isn’t a single drug that’s been shown to work for this condition. Fluvoxamine helps some o f us, while some have been helped by Prozac or other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Others say they’ve found relief through behavioral approaches like meditating, praying, or just staying busy. Many say it helps if they avoid triggers, but it’s nearly impossible to stay away from all of them: Everyday activities such as walking, jogging, listening to music, or driving a car can all open the door to intense daydreaming sessions. And once we get into our imaginary worlds, it’s tempting to stay there. Until more studies are completed, Somer said, obsessive daydreamers have no refuge outside of peer support groups. Since his first paper on the topic appeared in 2002, he has received several emails a week from people who daydream obsessively. “It frustrates me to

no end that there’s no response, no knowledge to offer them,” he said. For now, he says, their only real source of help is online. A brief tour of the Internet reveals that there are Yahoo groups and chat rooms devoted to the problem, as well as a Maladaptive Daydreaming Facebook page and a number of YouTube videos. The Wild Minds Network, one such website devoted to the problem, has more than 3,000 users. Some members of this robust online community are immersed in new fictional characters and have family trees for them going back decades. Others have built imaginary worlds based in Medieval times, the English countryside in the early 1900s, or outer space. Still others, like me, borrow from existing stories. “Recently, I spent two years dreaming constantly about the Harry Potter books,” wrote one Wild Minds visitor who described herself as a 48-year-old woman, “and I just couldn’t stop! It really scared me. I got in trouble at work because I couldn’t stay in reality. Professor Snape was a huge trigger for me, and I think it’s because he reminds me a lot of my dad.” People who visit the forum report losing their jobs, struggling to have successful relationships, or avoiding human contact altogether in order to concentrate on their daydreams. Some even contemplate suicide. Cordellia Amethyste Rose, a 34-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who founded the site, says she had to quit school because of her daydreaming. “When it was at its worst,” she says, “I felt the daydreaming was my main reality, and I’d only peek out into the main world now and then. It’s like I’m an alcoholic with an unlimited supply of booze. I can’t turn it off.” Unlike many others, she has found a productive way to channel her obsession—in her case, by creating a website that helps

others learn more about it. These daydreamers aren’t just commiserating with one another. They’re also far ahead of the researchers in many ways: They’re formulating symptom lists, developing online quizzes, like this one, which more than 17,000 people have taken, and sharing information about what helps them break out of their fantasies. “I recently found that constantly writing wandering thoughts down, or keeping track of them, keeps you from falling into intense daydreaming,” writes one user. “I daydream less when I haven’t turned on the television or logged onto YouTube for a few days,” observes another. Other suggestions included scheduling blocks of non-daydreaming time, exercising, and staring at a specific object, like one leaf on a tree. As I explore these online forums, I often think of all t h e years I spent looking for someone else like me. Maladaptive daydreaming still isn’t an officially recognized condition, but it’s clear that people around the world are experiencing the same symptoms: the hypnotic movements, the plots and characters, and the crippling inability to focus on the real world. As a researcher, I hope to find out much more about this condition and help the medical profession learn to address it. That would be the next best thing to going back in time and telling 12-year-old Jayne that she’s not alone.

REALITY IDENTITY 35

Miley Cyrus: My gender identity is fluid

I don’t relate to being boy or girl

ver the years, M i l ey Cyrus has pondered the question of her own gender identity and in her new interview with ‘Paper’ magazine, the singer opened up about being gender ‘fluid.’

individuals have different gender identities at different times. A genderfluid individual’s gender identity could be multiple genders at once, and then switch to none at all, or move between single gender identities.” Miley went on to talk about her also fluid sexual preferences by saying, “I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult — anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me.”

Miley Cyrus, 22, is giving the world a look into her personal life like never before. The singer talked openly about being gender fluid and exactly what that means to her in her new interview with Paper magazine — find out exactly what she said about identifying with being neither male nor female.

The singer also revealed that she’s had several relationships with women in the past. “I’ve had that,” she admits. “But people never really looked at it, and I never brought it into the spotlight.” She went on to talk about coming out to her mom at the age of 14. “I remember telling her I admire women in a different way. And she asked me what that meant. And I said, I love them. I

“I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl,” Miley explained in the interview. For those who still have questions as to exactly what “gender fluid” means, nonbinary.org defines the term as: “Genderfluid aka Gender-fluid, Gender Fluid, or Fluid Gender is an identity under the multigender, nonbinary, and transgender umbrellas. Genderfluid

love them like I love boys” .

COOL

YOU THAT have to PLAY

“Second life”

“Mister Mosquito”

“LSD dream emulator”

“Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou”

“Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire”

“The Sims 1 Makin Magic”

“Dior Eyes” for backstage access Fashion giant Dior develops 3D printed VR headset

hile 3D printed accessories and even outfits have slowly but certainly started taking over the world of fashion, French fashion house Dior has now given a very unusual spin to that fact. They have developed the Dior Eyes, a 3D printed virtual reality headset that will bring the fashion show into your living room. Always wanted to go backstage and see all the effort that goes into a single runway performance? With the Dior Eyes you can, and even without bothering the models. Dior, of course, is a manufacturer of a wide range of luxury high-end goods, from perfumes, to fashion and jewelry that has been around for decades and decades. But as they have a reputation for innovation and unusual approaches, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that they have ventured into the virtual reality world. ‘Celebrate a new era in the relationship between Dior and its customers: sharing a brand new

content form and retail experience. Create a never seen before experience unique to Dior universe,’ they say. As they explain on the developer’s website, this Dior Eyes 3D printed virtual reality headset grew out of desire to increase customer interaction with Dior. ‘Client behaviors around the word have seriously evolved: they talk, they share, they comment. Client experience is now about consistency and emotion, because emotions are more profitable than messages. People don’t want reasons to buy products, they want true bonds,’ they write. Called “retailtainment”, it’s the 21rst century way of interacting with the fans of your product. ‘We decided to create a genuinely thrilling experience that would give Dior clients the physical sensation of living the Dior show backstage. We knew that people are very intrigued by what’s happening behind the curtains, so we decided that we wanted to give them the opportunity to see it all.

N LI V I G IN

N SE C O D LIFE 51

ETER YELLOWLEES, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, has been teaching about schizophrenia for 20 years, but says that he was never really able to explain to his students just how their patients suffer. So he went online, downloaded some free software and entered Second Life. This is a “metaverse” (ie, metaphysical universe), a three-dimensional world whose users, or “residents”, can create and be anything they want. Mr Yellowlees created hallucinations. A resident might walk through a virtual hospital ward, and a picture on the wall would

in Second Life. “This is my first virtual appearance,” Mr Warner joked, “I’m feeling a little disembodied.” They then proceeded to discuss Iraq and other issues as they would in real life, with 62 other avatars attending (some of them levitating), until Mr Warner disappeared in a cloud of pixels.

suddenly flash the word “shitface”. The floor might fall away, leaving the person to walk on stepping stones above the clouds. An in-world television set would change from showing an actual speech by Bob Hawke, Australia’s former prime minister, into Mr Hawke shouting, “Go and kill yourself, you wretch!” A reflection in a mirror might have bleeding eyes and die.

Warcraft”, by Blizzard Entertainment, a firm in California, which has more than 7m subscribers. These worlds are the modern, interactive, equivalents of Nordic myths and Tolkien fantasies, says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University and the author of “Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games”. They allow players to escape into their imaginations, and to take part by, say, joining with others to slay a monster.

When Mr Yellowlees invited, as part of a trial, Second Life’s public into the ward, 73% of the visitors said afterwards that it “improved [their] understanding of schizophrenia.” Mr Yellowlees then went further. For about $300 a month, he leases an island in Second Life, where he has built a clinic that looks exactly like the real one in Sacramento where many of his students practise. He gives his students “avatars”, or online personas, so they can attend his lectures inside Second Life and then experience hallucinations. “It’s so powerful that some get quite upset,” says Mr Yellowlees. Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over islands, meander through castles and gawk at dragons. But increasing numbers use Second Life for things that are quite serious. They form support groups for cancer survivors. They rehearse responses to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. They build Buddhist retreats and meditate. Many use it as an enhanced communications medium. Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia who is considered a possible Democratic candidate for president in 2008, recently became the first politician to give an interview in Second Life. His avatar (also named Mark Warner) flew into a virtual town hall and sat down with Hamlet Au, a full-time reporter

By emphasising creativity and communication, Second Life is different from other synthetic online worlds. Most “massively multi-player online role-playing games”, or MMORPGs (pronounced “morpegs”), offer players pre-fabricated or themed fantasy worlds. The biggest by far is “World of

Making, not slaying Second Life, by contrast, was designed from inception for a much deeper level of participation. “Since I was a kid, I was into using computers to simulate reality,” says Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that launched Second Life commercially three years ago. So he set out to construct something that would allow people to “extend reality” by building a virtual version of it, a “second life” not unlike that envisioned by Neal Stephenson in “Snow Crash”, a science-fiction novel published in 1992. Unlike other virtual worlds, which may allow players to combine artefacts found within them, Second Life provides its residents with the equivalent of atoms—small elements of virtual matter called “primitives”—so that they can build things from scratch. Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab’s product-development boss, gives the example of a piano. Using atomistic construction, a resident of Second Life might build one out of primitives, with all the colours and textures that he would like. He might add sound to the primitives representing the keys, so the piano could actually be played in Second Life. “Of course, since these are primitives, the piano could also fly or follow the resident around like a pet,” says Mr Ondrejka. Because everything about Second Life is intended to make it an engine of creativity, Linden Lab early

on decided that residents should own the intellectual property inherent in their creations. Second Life now allows creators to determine whether the stuff they conceive may be copied, modified or transferred. Thanks to these property rights, residents actively trade their creations. Of about 10m objects created, about 230,000 are bought and sold every month in the in-world currency, Linden dollars, which is exchangeable for hard currency. Linden Lab estimates that the total value (in “real” dollars) this year will be about $60m. Second Life already has about 7,000 profitable “businesses”, where avatars supplement or make their living

revenues of $1m, not counting the commissions that it takes on currency exchanges between Linden dollars and hard cash. As a private company, Linden Lab does not disclose its exact revenues, although Mr Rosedale says the firm is “close to profitability”.

from their in-world creativity. The top ten in-world entrepreneurs are making average profits of just over $200,000 a year.

is virtual (aside from the value of the paper used for the bills) in that it requires consumers to have faith in its worth. In the context of online games, virtual economies much bigger than Second Life’s have existed for years. Many people in poor countries, called “gold farmers”, play games such as “World of Warcraft” professionally to score weapons, points or lives to sell to lazier players in rich countries. But Second Life is unique in that residents conceive what they sell. As such, says Mr Lanier, it is “probably the only example of a self-sustained economy” on the internet.

By emphasising creativity and communication, Second Life is different from other synthetic online worlds Second Life’s total devotion to what is fashionably called “user-generated content” now places it, unlike other MMORPGs, at the centre of a trend called Web 2.0. This term usually refers to free online services delivered through a web browser—for example, social networks in which users blog and share photos. Second Life is not delivered through a web browser but through its own software, which users need to install on their computers. In other respects, however, it is now often held up as the best example of Web 2.0. “It celebrates individuality,” says Jaron Lanier, who pioneered the concept of “virtual reality” in the 1980s and is now “science adviser” at Linden Lab. And it connects people, he says, because “the act of creation is the act of being social.” The Web 2.0 crowd also extols Second Life for its highly original business model. Most Web 2.0 firms try to build audiences around user-generated content in order to sell advertising to them. This assumes the availability of unlimited advertising dollars, a notion that is increasingly ridiculed. Linden Lab does not sell advertising; instead it is a virtual property company. It makes money when residents lease property—an island, say—by charging an average of $20 per virtual “acre” per month. Only about 25,000 residents, or about 3% or the population, lease property, but that already amounts to 53,800 acres, which, in real life, would be bigger than Boston. This works out to monthly

A common reaction to such numbers is astonishment that anybody should pay anything at all for something that exists only in a metaphysical sense. But “there’s actually no economic puzzle in this; all kinds of things derive their economic value only from the realm of the virtual,” says Indiana University’s Mr Castronova. The American dollar, for instance,

For all these reasons—its ability to change the real lives of its residents, its innovations in technology and in its business model—Second Life has become a darling of Silicon Valley. It promises to be “disruptive”, says Mitch Kapor, the inventor of the Lotus spreadsheet that played a big role in the personal-computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. He is now chairman of Linden Lab. To him, Second Life is comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. “Spending part of your day in a virtual world will become commonplace” and “profoundly normal,” says Mr Kapor. Ultimately, he thinks, Second Life will “displace both desktop computing” and other two-dimensional “user interfaces”. As “a hothouse of innovation and experiment,” he says, Second Life may even “accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”

Back to this reality It is bold and early to make such predictions. After all, Second Life is still a relatively small virtual world— only about 9,000 residents are usually logged in at any one time, for example. About two-thirds create content from scratch, but mostly they customise

things that they find or browse passively. And a lot of the wares on offer are banal. Whereas a few residents choose very innovative bodies for their avatars, most have shapes, male and female, that hew to the default templates and look, predictably, like cosmetically enhanced porn stars. Among the artefacts, there is some genuine art but quite a bit of junk. Endless possibilities: Donna Meyer, a grandmother from New York, and her avatar Is Second Life a nirvana where unknown talent can prove its creative mettle and make it in the real world? “You can create your own island and people come to it,” said Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a prominent venture capitalist. But “I don’t see any correlation between that and what it’s going to take to be a designer and have a skill set to succeed in the world.” Mr Castronova also cautions against overestimating the depth and breadth of Second Life’s economy. Yes, people do create clothes and games and spacecraft in Second Life and then sell them. But most of the big money comes from the virtual equivalent of land speculation, as people lease islands, erect pretty buildings and then rent them to others at a premium. Tongue in cheek, Mr Castronova compares Second Life’s in-world boom to America’s house-price bubble. In artistic terms, there is not always much difference between building an in-world house and designing a personal web page. There are also stirrings of discontent among some of the “older” (if one can use that term in a three-yearold metaverse) and more purist residents of Second Life about what they see as a menacing trend toward commercialism. One avatar, for example, has created “MetaAdverse”, a network of advertising billboards inside Second Life to which property developers can feed images of their creations. More controversially, Second Life is also attracting the attention of corporations and advertisers from the real world hoping to attract the metaverse’s residents. Publishers now organise book launches and readings in Second Life. The BBC has rented an island, where it holds music festivals and parties. Sun Microsystems is preparing to hold in-world press conferences, featuring avatars of its top executives. Wells Fargo, an American bank, has built a branded “Stagecoach” island, where avatars can pull Linden dollars out of a virtual cash machine and learn about personal finance. Starwood, a hotel and resort chain, is

unveiling one of its new hotels in the virtual world. Toyota is the first carmaker to enter Second Life. It has been giving away free virtual vehicles of its Scion brand and, in October, will start selling all three Scion models. The price will be modest, says Adrian Si, the marketing manager at Toyota behind the project. Toyota really hopes that an “aftermarket” develops as avatars customise their cars and sell them on, thus spreading the brand “virally”. Toyota will be able to observe how avatars use the cars and might, conceivably, even get ideas for engineering modifications in the real world, he says. Those Scion cars have “great driving performance for in-world physics,” says Reuben Steiger, the boss of Millions of Us, a company he founded this year to bring companies like Toyota into Second Life for marketing and brand-building. “How it corners and makes sounds when it changes gears is great.” So Toyota, which is a client of his, along with Sun Microsystems and even Mr Warner, shows that Second Life is “perfect for creating experiences around a brand,” says Mr Steiger. “We don’t think that conventional advertising will be very prevalent,” he says, because it would “be badly received culturally”. Advertising in Second Life is not about “trapping people” but about captivating and stimulating them. A good campaign in Second Life costs about $200,000 dollars, he reckons, of which only a tiny part is property leases and most goes to paying the talented designers to create great virtual stuff.

Virtual strip mall? Inevitably, this sort of thing turns some residents off. Will Second Life, that realm of individualism and pure creativity and spontaneity, get plastered over by the same mega-brands and mass culture that have, arguably, made the physical world such a homogenous place? In real life, many avatars argue, big business tends to push out small artisans. If the same happens in Second Life, the metaverse will lose its raison d’être. Mr Rosedale, Linden Lab’s founder, empathises with the concern, but thinks it is misplaced. “That is a fear which comes from the real world that is not likely to be borne out in Second Life,” he says. His arguments are all economic. In the physical world land is scarce, so big brands can buy up much of it; in Second Life, Linden Lab simply allocates more computer-processing power and makes even more

islands available. The world is infinitely expandable, in other words. If one patch did become homogenous and drab, avatars would simply fly off to the next. Another economic difference, says Mr Rosedale, is the lack of economies of scale in Second Life. In real life, a shoemaker, say, can reduce the average cost of making a pair by producing huge amounts, and the average cost of marketing by buying advertising in bulk. In Second Life, however, scale means nothing. There is no manufacturing cost to minimise. Gimmicks, such as giving away free shoes, are useless because nobody actually needs shoes at all. Nike,

for innovations that may help people in real life. Already, therapists are using Second Life to help autistic children, because it is a safe environment to practice giving signals to others and interpreting the ones coming back. Other organisations are using Second Life for long-distance learning. Overall, says Jaron Lanier, the veteran of virtual-reality experiments, Second Life “unquestionably has the potential to improve life outside.”

say, has no inherent competitive advantage over a hobbyist who likes to design shoes (or feet, paws, wings or claws) for fun. Thus, says Mr Rosedale, whereas the physical world has relatively few things that are sold in huge numbers, Second Life has huge numbers of things that are sold in relatively small quantities. In the statistical jargon, Second Life’s economy trades in “the long tail” of things. This is why, for the time being, Mr Rosedale prefers to rule Second Life with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” only. To him that means treating every resident the same, whether it happens to be Toyota or “an 80-yearold woman from India.” Both will pay the same price for their acres; what they do with it is up to them. If it ever became necessary, he adds, Linden Lab could “become a regulator and break up monopolies”, but this does not seem likely to come about. How, then, is one to make sense of Second Life? For those new to it, it appears to be too mind-boggling to have much relevance to real life. For those who spend time inside, however, Second Life ironically tends to resemble the real world even as its obvious differences become clear. Mr Kapor, Linden Lab’s chairman, is the first to agree. “People bring all their karma” into the world, he says. Alongside benevolence, there is harassment. If Second Life were ever to become truly mainstream, there is no guarantee that residents would not pollute it with racism and hatred. Perhaps crime too: residents had to reset their passwords after a recent hacking attempt. These things may be a criticism of human nature, but it cannot be blamed on Second Life. Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks that Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments.” From new approaches to corporate branding to education, Second Life is a petri dish

julie

watai 58

watai 59

It All Started with Akira and Ghost in the Shell: How Science Fiction Influenced Julie’s Style Most of Julie’s photos are of young girls, and she does a lot of self-portraits as well. So far, she’s published two photo collections, SAMURAI GIRL and the more recent HARDWARE GIRLS, and she also puts out a photo magazine called HARDWARE GIRLS MAGAZINE. Many of her photos are available on her personal website, http://juliewatai.jp/. Julie isn’t the sort of photographer who just looks for beautiful nature scenes and shoots them as them as they are, with no editing. But at the same time, her photos have a distinctive feel very different from the post-processing techniques that are popular today. Her visual style is the result of a multilayered editing process that synthesizes her photographic material using PC software, and the result can only be called a “parallel world”—one that really exists, but in a dimension somehow different from the reality the rest of us live in. “My first priority is to create things that express my worldview—things that don’t necessarily exist in the world today.” And the things that shape Julie’s worldview are none other than the manga, anime, and video games that define otaku culture in Japan. Julie says she began working as a photographer because she was heavily deeply by the worlds she saw in anime and manga, and she wanted to capture those worlds in photographs. “I started taking pictures because I wanted to find a way express the flat world of manga and anime in three dimensions. ‘If I can visualize that worldview in a single photo, I’ll have accomplished my mission.’ That was what I was thinking at the time.” Even the color and shading of her photos reveal how deeply otaku culture has influenced her. She says her lush, bring coloring style was inspired by TV anime. The works that influenced her most when she was young were science fiction works like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. She says the “girl with machine” concept, which she uses in a lot of her photos, was inspired by Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed.

Android Love Story In 2014, Julie caused a stir when she announced

LOVE VALLEY, a photo series featuring portraits of herself with the female android ASUNA(AL-M 008X-01). “It was really shocking the first time I saw ASUNA. My first thought was that she was really cute, but it was a different sort of ‘cuteness’ from the love dolls you see that are designed for men. It felt innocent, somehow, and I was inspired by her innocence and decided I had to photograph her.”

“I Want to ‘Be’

The result was a phoA Free Wi-Fi tobook that tells of a love story between a Hotspot!” girl (played by Julie) and an android—the sort of parallel world that could only be created by an artist with a well-honed understanding of sci-fi. Photographing ASUNA, however, was not so simple. In fact, Julie says it brought its own kind of heartache into the process. “The shoot was fun, but it was definitely very hard. Androids don’t have the same range of motion in their joints that humans do, and it’s hard to pose them in a way that looks natural. What robotics engineers say is really true: it’s very, very difficult conveying natural human movements in a machine.” In addition to being influenced by otaku subcultures, Julie also identifies as a “tech geek.” Her photos are full of electronic gadgets, and recently she’s received attention for her work in electronic design. The inspiration for her foray into electronics came, she says, from meeting one the inventors of the Arduino circuit board in Italy. “At first, electronic design seemed like a huge creative hurdle. But when I met Arduino’s creator, he told me ‘I want my invention to be used by artists, even if they’re not good at electronics. I made this because I wanted you to work with it, Julie.’ His words were an inspiration to me, so I decided to start working with Arduino.” Once she figured out how to link her creative process with the technical principles of electronic design, Julie managed to clear her creative hurdles, moving beyond the boundaries photography and graphic design into the territory of a real “maker.”

The Buggy Furby One of her most popular electronic works can be seen in a video uploaded to YouTube in 2011, which shows her “circuit bending” a Furby. Circuit bending is an audio hacking process that involves disrupting the current in electronic musical instruments or toys to produce unusual sounds or movements. At the time, there were a lot of popular circuit benders among media artists in the USA, but almost none in Japan. A popular internet rumor around this time claimed that “if you put a Furby in a microwave it’ll start making weird noises!” This rumor went up on message boards across the internet, and Julie decided she wanted to create a human-induced version of that effect by circuit bending a Furby. But she didn’t think it wouldn’t be very interesting just hacking a toy’s circuit board, so she decided to put on a maid costume while she bent the circuit and upload the whole thing to YouTube as a kind of surrealist demo video. The video opens with Julie sticking a pair of scissors into the Furby. By the end, the toy has begun speaking some kind of space language—the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from Star Wars aliens or something. The response was immediate, excited, and wildly diverse. “See? Japanese people really are crazy!!” “Is this what Japan does to women?” “OMG Will you marry me!!” These were just a few of the comments that popped up in the thread.

Needless to say, Julie has taken a lot of self-portraits in her career, but whenever she took one with her cell phone, she was always annoyed that there was no in-camera flash she could use. What kind of flash would be right for all the young girls around Japan trying to take “kawaii” (cute) selfies? Julie used her personal experience to explore the problem, and designed a ring-shaped light that can be attached to a smartphone. As soon as it went up on social media, the idea got a huge response. In a way, that isn’t really surprising: now that selfies are a global phenomenon, it’s undeniable that a huge number of young girls are looking to take “kawaii” self-portraits. Julie plans to start a crowdfunding campaign on kibidango to produce Cell*Kira. What started as one Japanese artist’s pet project may end up changing selfies all over the world. (Of course, that wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. After all, the selfie stick was invented in Japan.)

A New Era for Otaku Art So far we’ve focused on introducing Julie’s products and projects, but maybe the most challenging thing about her work is the issue of how few major artists in the world have such deep roots in otaku culture. Superflat creator Takashi Murakami may have gotten famous trying to absorb otaku culture into the fine art world, but it was only recently that this thing called an otaku was recognized as “cool” in mainstream society. Subcultures, generally, tend to inspire negative stereotypes, and otaku are no exception to the rule.

It was exactly the response Julie was hoping for. “On one level, I just wanted to see if I could redesign a Furby, but I was also worried about what sort of reaction the video would get on YouTube. A while ago I gave a speech at China’s Maker Faire, and when I showed them the Furby video everyone in the audience started laughing. I was happy that what I’d done was funny to people all over the world.”

Kawaii-ifying Girls around the World Today, Julie is stepping out of her territory as an artist and taking a stab at product development. Her first product is “Cell*Kira,” an in-camera light that can be used as a flash for when people take selfies.

We asked Julie how she feels about being an artist who tries to convey the world of otaku culture. “When I started doing this, my goal was to create really amazing art that would make people go ‘what?! Is this what’s cool now?’ There’s no reason ‘otaku’ should have to be a negative thing! This stuff, all of it, shows the world how cool we are! Anyway that was the kind of thought process I had. I wanted to get rid of the negative image of otaku and help create a positive one.” But for otaku culture to be recognized as “cool,” she would need to find a positive way of expressing it. Julie’s art gives of a strong “pop” vibe, but a pop vibe

that seems steeped in an otaku sensibility whether it shows otaku elements (wires, wigs, collectible toys) or not. And when someone who does identifies as a “geek” looks at her work, he can have the experience of sinking into a world even deeper and stranger than what he thought he knew about otaku. According to Julie, a lot of creative people have shown up recently who want to express the “coolness” of otaku. Even fashion designers are getting in on the act. “There are already a lot of people already who are fascinated with otaku, so a new wave of people has shown up, and all of them are saying ‘even though this is otaku, I want to make it cool!’” chloma, the fashion brand the provided clothes for LOVE VALLEY, has introduced clothing lines that offer an interesting fusion of otaku culture and mode fashion. The brand’s designers are definitely part of this “new wave” movement to make otaku cool.

“I Want to ‘Be’ A Free Wi-Fi Hotspot!” Julie says she wants her existence as an artist to be “like a free wi-fi spot.” In that statement, she may be revealing everything about her creative values. “Being the kind of thing that gives the people around you something for free—I think that’s really beautiful. I think art has that kind of ‘free beauty’ aspect to it too—the sort of thing that, maybe, can give people new energy or laughter, without asking for anything in return. If I could ‘be’ that for people, that would be the best thing ever.” Julie has already given exhibitions in Europe, but she’s yet to experience the art scene in America. She says she’s looking forward to doing something in New York, and has a lot of expectations for the work she’ll do in the US. What kind of reaction will Julie get from the Brooklyn art scene? We’ll see what happens when otaku culture “hacks” the New York art world!

Takeshi

“It’s more like technology is this monster: a fast-moving, crazy thing that seems alien in a lot of ways.”

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, and animation. He currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. Murata has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York;

Bad at Sports contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, to discuss Murata’s most recent digitally animated video, OM Rider (2013). OM Rider follows two animated creatures—a wizened old man that Andrews describes as “half the Curious George Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks.

The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title. OM Rider contains Murata’s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces. The conversation begins with a question about the creation of the video.

Murata

Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Salon 94, New York. Murata’s work is featured in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

Takeshi Murata: When Chris [Perez] moved [Ratio 3] into its current space, I was blown away by the end wall and thought, “Man, I would love to do a projection there.” I’ve always loved horror movies, so I thought that this space could be really cinematic and tried to transform the gallery by blacking it out. It was a perfect opportunity to go in this direction.

I do bring in these render farms, which are amazing. There are five guys based in Poland, and all of their computers are in South Korea. I would send them the files, and within a day they would send back the fully rendered thing. On their computers it will just take an hour to do what would take days on mine. They made it possible.

Brian Andrews: Historically, your work is more about still life and doesn’t involve narrative, with the exception of the I, Popeye video. This is the first video I’ve seen in which a narrative unfolds. Why that shift?

Does that disconnect you from the images in a way? I imagine it might, because so much of your stuff is intensively about composition with light, and that’s the one thing you really can’t preview in the same way.

TM: Even in a completely visually abstract time-based piece, I will gravitate towards a narrative arc, which creates a foundation for building an atmosphere of space or texture. To me, the narrative itself actually isn’t all that important; it is just this anchor to build upon.

“To me, the narrative itself actually isn’t all that important; it is just this anchor to build upon.”

BA: So what is your pipeline? What do you actually work with to create these videos?

In the initial stages, I use two pieces of software, which are ZBrush and Cinema 4D. ZBrush is a great sculpting program. I made the characters, the heads—all that stuff—in that program and then put it in the animation program and rig it to get it ready to be animated.

That part is a challenge. In a way, you can anticipate what it will look like. But I also can’t wait for the next stage, when you can see things more immediately, and you don’t necessarily need to work with wireframes or very simply shaded objects. The video is essentially bookended by musical performances, on the keyboard in the beginning and the trumpet at the end, with this impressive soundscape throughout. I’d love to hear about how you brought sound design into this project, and how the collaboration with Robert worked? You have to create a sound because a room is never totally silent, there’s always something there. Robert Beatty: I’ve done several soundtracks for Takeshi in the past, and they were always based in abstract sound. Takeshi sent me some of the early stuff for this one, and I realized that I was going to design the sound, something that I had never really done before. And so I just went off the deep end, trying to figure out what these characters and the space they were in would sound like. This animation is all done on the computer; there’s no sound already there. It’s totally silent. You have to start from the ground up, making even the background noise for each space.

And you do it all yourself, which is an extensive amount of work.

I love that Robert did this mix of what I would consider to be modern foleying, which is just synthesized, crazy sounds like white noise.

It is, yeah. There are parts like rigging up characters, which is one of the most tedious, annoying things to do, that I would love to hire someone to pass off to. But I’ll often have a vague picture of what I want to do, so it’s perfect to be hands-on with the tools to understand what they’re capable of doing and how far I can push them. I think within the limits of what I can do and where I can go with the technology.

So much of it is electronic; the footsteps sound is just filtered white noise. Somehow I was able to sculpt it so it sounds like realistic footsteps walking up stairs. A guy named Devin Flynn created the music that the wolf is playing at the beginning, C. Spencer Yeh did the wolf’s voice, and the trumpet was sourced from YouTube. But much of everything else in there was created from

scratch Some of it is weird, jerry-rigged techniques, in which I’m recording bubble wrap or pouring water into a glass for the vomit sound.

a lot of parts of the video that are very minimal, as far as its movement, sound, and composition are concerned. It’s pretty strident in many ways.

Patricia Maloney: To what extent did the sounds that Robert was proposing impact the characterization and the development of the visuals?

It’s exciting to hear things that sound like they could be footsteps but in a space you’ve never heard before. They’re created in this space that doesn’t bring to mind like things at all.

We’ve worked together for so many years now. I think it’s been ten years, right? Almost ten years. Takeshi has been in New York or Los Angeles the whole time we’ve been working together, and I’m in Kentucky, so it’s not like we’re going over to each other’s houses with what we’re working on. I would critique things Takeshi sent me, and he would adjust them. So it’s almost as if I’m getting dailies. It’s an organic process; we let things grow off of each other. It’s a great way of collaborating, especially with this other sensory process. It can really influence what I’m thinking about and what I’m doing. It’s got this nice disconnect in a way that really helps for the visuals to work. I’m curious to hear from both of you about the points at which the image or sound had to have fidelity to what is real versus when it could be completely fabricated. I’ve always made a conscious effort within anything that I was working on to bring in an organic feeling or bring in natural things while working in this space that is totally fabricated. In my photography, there’s so much information there, but I love to make [the still lives] so that they’re limited and very focused on just what’s there. It’s the same with the animation. I love taking all of the detail out and focusing on what I’m interested in—in this case, the main actions or characters. It’s like starting from zero. You have to create a sound because a room is never totally silent, there’s always something there. Initially when we started working on this piece, we talked about the sound being less narrative than the video, and the sound going in and out of sync with what was visually happening. But the more we worked, the more I tried to get that vomit sound perfect. I got obsessed with trying to figure out what these things would actually sound like. I wasn’t concerned with it being realistic but it being believable. And then there are

There’s a powerful part of our brain that puts meaning or puts the nature of being back into such things. As long as that sound happens when we expect to see the foot falling, we’re just going to interpret it as a footfall. Even though it’s clearly an abstracted form, we create that meaning with it, which is fantastic. The still lives have always felt like you are re-creating the world that’s around you, but just enough. It’s not a Hollywood approach, which is hyperreal. You seem to offer a stripped-down, minimal amount of information to make what that claim might be, in which all of the sudden I get what that’s supposed to be. It is a much more fascinating use of what that technology could potentially do than be used to shock and awe. Your images never quite cohere around any kind of logic that explains why these things are together. I like the destabilizing impact that has: “How do I make sense of this?” There’s a suggestion that some kind of coding—and I use that word purposefully— is in operation, and I wonder if I am going to be able to decipher it. I tend to not analyze that coding too strongly. In the progress of making the work, I collected collections of things, and then whichever ones felt like they had some strange connection to each other become the work. I love humor and think it’s a very basic way to bring a viewer in. It’s a way of keeping things more approachable, maybe thinking about things or space that might not necessarily foster that kind of feeling. I use the term coding because there is this incredible anxiety in the Bay Area at this moment about the resurgence of tech and all of the economic impacts that it’s having culturally. It overtly manifests and is situated around things such as rampant real-estate development, displacement, and gentrification. But there is also deep anxiety emanating from the lack of recognition. The languages of the tech sector are so unfamiliar to me and the inverse is true as well. The language that we use to describe visual culture

is really specific. Both sectors are speaking to the production of knowledge, but there’s no translation between those languages, even around the same object. And I feel that there’s something in your work that is trying to unpack that.

Nice. So where are you going with this stuff? I’m pretty content with the way I’m working and being able to explore things with gallery shows dotted throughout that process. I hope to have that freedom for as long as I can.

It’s more like technology is this monster: a fast-moving, crazy thing that seems alien in a lot of ways, and culture is trailing it. I want culture—the things that are produced with the technology—to move as fast and as quickly. And maybe another anxiety is when technology gets that far out control, out there, where it’s not really addressed within t h e arts. It’s a generational thing too. It’s accepted that art is important, that it needs to be supported. These kids are young—I feel like art is competing with a new Ferrari. I would love to make art that actually is so meaningful to them that they might think, “Instead of that Ferrari, maybe I’ll buy that weird video.” But it’s a serious challenge.

“So I love putting that level of detail into a thrown-away McDonald’s cup or a sagging trumpet.”

It’s strange because Takeshi is using this technology that is really new, and I’m using things that have been around for years; parts of the soundtrack were field recordings done on a cassette tape. The video technology is always getting better while I’m using things that are tried and true. There is something in your work that is more approachable to an audience because it is so stripped down. You can see simple lighting and rudimentary animation; there are none of the seductive, otherworldly qualities of what these technologies are used for, right? It’s not Harry Potter; it’s not Gravity. It is none of that stuff. We can recognize the technology that you’re using even if we don’t know how to do it ourselves. With the still lives, I am also trying to exploit that veneer of that technology. Ninety-nine percent of its usage is to sell products to people, to make a perfume bottle shine. So I love putting that level of detail into a thrown-away McDonald’s cup or a sagging trumpet.

identity virtu ality 70

Could this creepy robot be the answer to eternal life?

Bina 48

echnology used to make Bina 48 could one day let us upload our minds to computers

conversations like a real, living person. Mrs Rothblatt, 60, an internet radio entrepreneur who lives as a transgender woman, believes the these ‘Mind Clones’ could eventually be used to help provide social interactions for people living alone and even help recreate the personalities of people after they have died.

It may be possible to live forever by uploading your memories, thoughts and personality onto a computer within the next ten or twenty years, according to a leading pioneer of the technology.

Mrs Rothblatt, who lives in Florida and is one of the highest paid female chief exective officers in the US, said that eventually people may be able to carry around clones of their own minds on their smartphones. Speaking to Bloomberg, she said: ‘Mind clone is a digital copy of your mind outside of your body.

The technology, which is similar to that seen in the film Transcendence starring Johnny Depp, is being developed by entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt. She has already created a disturbingly realistic robotic ‘clone’ of her wife Bina that she hopes will be a prototype for the technology.

‘Mind clones are ten to twenty years away. The mind clone will look like an avatar on the screen instead of a robot version.’

The robot apparently shares the ideas and personality of Bina by creating a database of her memories, beliefs and thoughts, along with information taken from social media interactions and blogs she shares. This allows the robot, called Bina48,

Mrs Rothblatt first began developing Bina48 five years ago to replicate her wife, who she

to express opinions and interact in

married 30 years ago.

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The Universe Might Be A Giant Hologram.

Is the world around us really just a trick of the eye?

cientists have long believed the universe could be a giant hologram -- a two-dimensional realm that only seems to be three-dimensional -- and now a group of Viennese researchers have done the math to prove that such a scenario isn’t quite as far-fetched as it seems.

equivalent to the information provided by the objects that generate the shadows,” Dr. Daniel Grumiller, a professor at the Vienna University of Technology’s Institute for Theoretical Physics and a co-author of a paper about the new research, told The Huffington Post in an email. “This principle, if correct, explains a number of puzzles in black hole physics pioneered by Stephen Hawking.” Though previous research showed that the holographic principle holds in theoretical worlds (anti-de Sitter spaces, anyone?), evidence suggesting that it holds under the conditions found in our own universe has been limited, according to Grumiller.

The idea that the universe is a 3-D “projection” onto some sort of flat, cosmic surface arises from the “holographic principle.” It states that all the data needed to fully describe a region of space can be encoded in just two dimensions. It was first proposed in the 1990’s by physicists Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft and Dr. Leonard Susskind as a way to solve a fundamental inconsistency between quantum physics and general relativity.

“Our main interest is to test the generality of the holographic principle,” he said in the email. “If it is correct, it must also work in flat space-time.” For the new research, the physicists used two theories of flat space-time to calculate

“If you know Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, then a way to understand the holographic principle is by saying that the information provided by the shadows is

a physical measure known

as “entanglement entropy.” The term describes the amount of entanglement -- where particles are linked and exert influence on each other across a distance -- in a quantum system. “If quantum gravity in a flat space allows for a holographic description by a standard quantum theory, then there must by physical quantities [sic], which can be calculated in both theories –- and the results must agree,” Grumiller said in a written statement. Indeed, they found that the value of the entanglement entropy in both theories was the same, which means it’s possible the holographic principle does apply to our universe -- and by extension, our universe could be holographic. But if that finding leaves you feeing flat, take heart. It’s still not proof that we live in a hologram.

POST INTERNET

ARCHITECTURE

Andreas Angelidakis in conversation with Carson Chan

For the past two decades, the World Wide Web has redefined what and how we know. We have enveloped ourselves in a thick, electromagnetic fog of information. We are breathing the protocological atmosphere of our own making. We have come to a point where the distinction between real and virtual has completely collapsed, and the resulting terrain is our new home.

For each techno-utopian claim there is a litany of counter claims. The Internet has allowed for individuals to represent themselves online, bypassing more traditionally centralized systems of control. But what of the caveats and conditions that come with online liberation? From what have we been emancipated, and in what are we now entering? As German philosopher and media theorist Byung Chul-han writes, “Today we live in the here and now … We live in times of a complete lack of spatial or temporal intervals, times without distance and without discretion.”

In 032c Issue 20 (Winter 2010/2011), architect Bjarke Ingels said that these concerns were precisely the ones we should be trying to align with urbanism and architecture. What does this new condition – or surround – entail for architecture? Yes, we can list the changes, and coin new names for them (contemporary art has chosen “Post-Internet”), but what good would that do? Due to the logistics of construction, architecture is perhaps the slowest boat to turn, and no amount of digital processing seems to be speeding it up. But perhaps this delayed reaction makes architecture the ideal discipline through which to observe our changing world. Architecture is the lava rock that distills rainwater of its impurities. It patiently absorbs its context, and registers its change in slow but reliable increments.

Although trained as an architect, ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS has eschewed designing physical spaces. After the economic crisis in Greece derailed his first brick-and-mortar projects, Angelidakis began creating architectural spaces that live as networked environments, navigated through web browsers and virtual worlds. As such, his work has become a meditation on the idea of ruin – both ancient and economic – and the potential of architecture as a site of of real-time social engagement. Angelidakis has been forced to adapt to the collapsing boundaries of physical space, transposing them to and from the confines of our LCD screens. 032c’s CARSON CHAN interviewed the architect.

CARSON CHAN: A lot of your work exists primarily in digital form, but you were trained as an architect in 1990s – both at SCI-Arc and at Columbia.

ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS: When I was studying architecture at SCI-Arc in LA, I hung out more with artists than with architects. The first cultural event I saw was a Mike Kelley performance at Beyond Baroque in Santa Monica. That was my initiation into contemporary art. I was impressed with how artists used their vocabulary. Architects worked with complex objects that were not very expressive, whereas with very simple gestures, or simple objects, artists could convey so much.

What year was this? I started SCI-Arc in 1989. Then I studied at Columbia in New York, and up until that time, I had not been involved with computers at all. The year I started at Columbia was the first year they introduced the paperless studio. They were the first school to do so, and it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary now, but back then it was revolutionar y. They gave us all email addresses and I had no idea what to do with mine. Keller Easterling “The social potenwas my professor, and tial of the network while other studios fo– of the Internet cused on form, she had us think critically about – really stuck with the computer and its me.” processes. At the time, everyone at school was playing Marathon, one of the first networked point-and-shoot computer games, and it was amazing to go around the school and see people in different rooms playing with each other. The social potential of the network – of the Internet – really stuck with me.

Would you say that you are more interested in building this kind of sociality as opposed to actual buildings? For a brief period, my studio evolved into a proper architecture office with employees and interns, and I had four commissions for buildings in Athens. All of them remain unbuilt because of the financial crisis, but this also let me realize that buildings weren’t

really for me. They take so long to make, and involve so many other processes and stakeholders to realize. I wanted to play with buildings, but not necessarily build them. I wanted to talk about them or speculate on the ways in which buildings were produced, or think about already produced buildings – how they are and what they actually do. This is why I started exhibiting my work and curating exhibitions.

On the back cover of the catalogue of your current exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens you wrote about how everything is a simulation – about how the real building is inside the architect’s mind. The material as a simulation of the real – it’s an idealist sentiment that goes back to Plato. What I’ve found with the few physical projects I’ve completed, is that after putting so much energy into a design, one ends up fighting with contractors and clients to achieve that ideal image in the mind’s eye. On the last day of construction, you photograph the project, and it looks exactly as you imagined. But the next day, when the client moves in, everything is rearranged and things go out of place. The moment that the project represents the ideal project is ridiculously brief. The “real project” exists only in your mind, and the material reality is just different. Not better or worse, but different. By definition, all buildings are a record of the past. The moment one is “built,” it’s already in the past tense. And because of the Internet, the moment buildings are published, two days later, they’re an old project. It takes years to make a building, but just days for it to become obsolete. How can we communicate through them anymore? It’s like communicating with cassette tapes. I’ve often thought about how the hyper-circulation of information flattens the past and puts us in a perpetual present. In the past five years or so, artists associated with the so-called “Post-Internet” movement have embraced this condition and its accompanying surreal, mash-up aesthetics. You mentioned that buildings become obsolete the moment they are published, but how else do you think the Internet has changed the way we think about architecture?

In the late 90s, with my friend Miltos Manetas, I discovered ActiveWorlds.com, a 3D, virtual-space online community. What was amazing was that people – or their avatar – would walk into them and give me their opinion. A number of things shifted in the way I saw architecture because of this. For one, if you’re trying to explain architecture to someone through a chat window, and it takes more than five sentences, they are gone. I found that I had to design quickly, and design in a way that was easy to explain. Take the Cloud House (2003). There’s not much explanation needed. It’s nominally self-evident: a house in the shape of a cloud. It was also pretty exciting to have the public watch as I was building. People would engage with me while I was designing, questioning my decisions in real time. It was as though my building’s audience inhabited my drawings.

Did operating on ActiveWorlds allow you think on a different scale than most architects do? Yes, and in a way, my frustrations as an architect were fulfilled. I didn’t feel the need to prove myself offline.

That’s interesting. In 2000, I was commissioned to make a project called Teleport Diner by the Färgfabriken Art Center in Stockholm, whose curator, Jan Aman, asked me to make an American diner. We had been in a diner in Brooklyn once, where well-known artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft, and many others were eating. They were sharing ideas and sharing food, and we thought that this was so much better than any exhibition of their work. We called it Teleport Diner and it was essentially a diner in ActiveWorlds where people from Stockholm and Brooklyn (and perhaps anywhere else) could meet. We built a replica of the virtual diner in Stockholm, where visitors could access the equivalent space in ActiveWorlds. It was something in-between, and it was an idea about the world we inhabit: there’s no real and no virtual, it’s always a blur and a mix.

saw all kinds of potential in it. That’s sort of how the Internet works.

What do you mean? Things – images, ideas – become viral and there is no way to control how they are presented. The same thing happened with Hand House (2011). It was re-blogged from my Tumblr something like two thousand times, but people didn’t know what it was, what it was about, or who made it.

Greece itself plays an important role for you, in the form of ruins and nostalgia. You once described ruins as things that “interrupt our normative sense of time.” You said that they necessitate a flattening, or reversal, of a normal sense of time – something the Internet does as well. Ruins are the opposite of new buildings. A new building exists only between the moment when construction ends and the client moves in. A ruin is the opposite: it is a building that accepts its imperfections and failures, and it’s a record of that history. Photographs of ruins question the validity of a new building, but of course the Internet has completely changed our conception of the new. Images of brand new buildings circulate immediately, along with images of old ones. We don’t concern ourselves with the “new,” but with the “interesting.” The reason I came back to Greece after my time in America was that I was more emotionally connected here. I was pulled by the nostalgia that Greece has as a country. It’s a country based on nostalgia. Of course, then the economic crisis happened and you could see Athens literally transform over the course of half a year.

Transform physically? Yes, physically. Walking around Athens, you can see that half the shops are closed, and everything is for rent.

Blue Wave

The Athens Marina (2009) project was a reflection on these conditions, right? It’s kind of a ruin in reverse.

I remember that moment in the mid-2000s when images of the Blue Wave from Neen World (2005) were published all over the Internet. I think people were excited to see an object that was conceived online take on different forms in reality. People

Athens Marina was an art competition launched by Dakis Joannou. The competition was for the marina where he keeps his boat – the one designed by Jeff Koons. I thought, “What could be the opposite of this shiny, luxury object?” My proposal was a ruin in

reverse in that it anticipates rising sea levels. The roof of the structure has a palm tree, so that when the sea level rises, it will look like an island with a tree on it. Time is flattened, yes, but there is something timeless and ancient about ruins. When I had access to a 3D printer, I printed out L e Corbusier’s Domino House (1915), made out of bones.

Domino House

I made these ruins into giant pillows – a play on their softness, and their origin in software.

We talked about how the Internet has reorganized the hierarchies of our pre-Internet world – that time, values, and space are all apprehended not based on quality, but on what draws our attention. You mentioned too that “And bethe “new” is no longer cause of the Intera value we care about. net, the moment If we live in a perpetual buildings are pubpresent, what happens to our models of lished, two days progress? later, they’re an old

The Domino House is an interesting figure because it was a structural system meant to stimulate the economy, by offering project.” a model of economic That I don’t know. I think efficiency. Recently, in the idea of progress is kind my travels in Greece, I of old-fashioned. The idea of saw all these “domthe future is itself old. It’s exino houses” everywhere: half-completed pired in the sense that we don’t find the projects that remain as concrete frames in idea of imagining the future fascinating anymore. the landscape. It’s a threatening future now, whereas the fascinatOne reason why Greece has all these incomplete structures is the economic crisis. Another reason is a Greek law that allows for structures built to the second floor to remain, even if the owner doesn’t have a building permit. People would build these two-story concrete frames as placeholders for future projects. Most of the time, they either ran out of money to finish the project, or the building was never intended to be finished immediately.

You’ve made these concrete frames into pillows, and I was wondering if you were suggesting a way in which we could deal with these structures. They are kind of non-places – not nature, not completely built. I see them almost as almost natural objects – like rock, like stone. The pillows were an early attempt to combine the ruin and the Internet. In 2007, I made a video in Second Life where I was trying to teach these concrete frames how to collapse and become a ruin. By altering the physical parameters of Second Life’s virtual environment, you can make the buildings tilt and crumble. These virtual buildings normally never grow old, they stay exactly the same once you’ve designed them. So I made an electronic ruin, and when I translated that into a gallery space,

ing future was in the 1960s. People were imagining going to the moon and living like the Jetsons. Now, the future is much more kind of a question mark rather than anything else. I guess I’m in no way trying to predict progress, or propose the new “new.” I’m much more interested in the flattening of time – in timelessness.

UN TA

lly

i e r

David OReilly spent months working on his video game, Mountain, in secret. He tweeted the announcement — “Theres

[sic] gonna be a real actual David OReilly game available in a couple weeks” —

on June 10, as E3, the massive game-industry conference, took over the L.A. Convention Center. 93

There is no quest. You save nothing. You solve no problems. You compete with no one. The hype came fast and the buzz grew loud. Big tech sites such as Kotaku, Engadget and Polygon jumped on the story: The guy who made the fictional video game for Spike Jonze’s movie Her now is making one in real life. It was a little out of the ordinary for the Irish animation artist, who lives and works in downtown Los Angeles. Normally, OReilly makes short films that appear in international film festivals. Even when his work wins prizes, and it often does, he doesn’t get that much press out of it. Video games, though, are a completely different world, a big-money industry supported by an army of blogs and YouTube channels, which discuss little more than the new releases. OReilly is intrigued by this. “I think it’s great that a big technology or game blog will talk about a simple art project as well as a Call of Duty type of game, and that the same audience will read both,” he says.

quickly taken in by the animators. Within two weeks, he knew that animation was what he wanted to do with his life. He learned traditional 2-D animation. He started making his own, simple video games. Once OReilly hit 18, he bounced around Europe — Ireland to the United Kingdom to Italy, then back to the U.K. before settling in Germany — as he learned the trade. He liked how animation felt like a magic trick that doesn’t lose its luster after all has been revealed. He can make static images move over and over again. It doesn’t get old. “Even though you know how the trick works, it still functions,” he says. “That’s kind of an amazing thing.”

Instead, you’re a mountain and your situation is determined by answers you give to questions at the start of the game. From there, you observe as the days cycle by. Fog might roll over the summit. Rain might shimmer over grass. Snow might cap the tiny rows of trees. If you fiddle around with your computer’s keyboard and touch pad, you’ll stumble on some Easter eggs. OReilly stresses that every experience is going to be different. “Some people will be frustrated by it,” he says. He doesn’t want to give away too much. Brandon Boyer of Venus Patrol, a website focused on artistic, independent games, booked OReilly for Horizon before seeing Mountain. He says Mountain’s simplicity makes it beautiful and significant.

In London, armed with a beginner’s portfolio, OReilly got a job at Shynola, working on the feature film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a Beck video. On his own time, he made a fan video for a track from electronic music artist Venetian Snares. It was dark and glitchy, with 3-D animation cut at a pace as frantic as the music. It was OReilly’s first stab at directing, and he was smitten with it. As a filmmaker, though, OReilly had little success in London. He pitched ideas for 40 music videos. None was accepted. He left for Berlin and started working on his own.

“It’s pretty effective as thinly veiled allegory for a life spent enduring and accumulating hurt and mass,” Boyer adds via email. OReilly, 29, grew up in Kilkenny, Ireland, about an hour from Dublin. At 14, he stumbled into an animation studio that had opened nearby, and was

His first two festival entries were attention getters. RGB XYZ, about a boy who gets kicked out of his home

Mountain, which became available July 1 for Mac, PC and Apple mobile devices, is the kind of project that has gamers arguing whether it’s actually a game. There is no quest. You save nothing. You solve no problems. You compete with no one.

and moves to the city, earned a Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008. Please Say Something, a tale of cat and mouse, won a Golden Bear award for best short film, the top prize, at the same event the following year. The stories are simple, the art deceptively so. RGB XYZ uses big blocks of color and bare-bones character designs, but shots will spin and flip upside down while pieces of the scene break up to resemble glitches. It’s computer-generated psychedelia. Please Say Something has a smoother look but still is linked together by a quick flash of a malfunction. Three years ago, OReilly headed to Los Angeles. He thought it would simply be a respite from another brutal Berlin winter, but he decided to stay. He now works out of a small office with two assistants. The people he met didn’t fit the Hollywood stereotype. “There were a lot of creative, independent artists, people who dip in and out of the industry but who do a lot of their own work,” he says. Plus, the cost of living was more affordable than in other major cities. OReilly could pursue both commercial work and his independent projects.

appreciates the way the artistic limitations pushed the player to use his imagination to flesh out the image. But actually making a game using current technology was a new experience. He spent the earlier part of this year learning Unity, a game engine, while working on another project for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device. Through that project, he met programmer Damien Di Fede, who became his only collaborator on Mountain. The game itself can be passively played. It’s possible to run it as you’re performing other tasks on the computer. Or you can take an active part in the world, striking keys until you figure out which ones trigger a response. It’s interesting on both levels. Watching the mountain can be soothing. Trying to make it do something might elicit an emotional response. Exploration, OReilly says, is part of the game. Whether that’s exploring the terrain or exploring yourself is up to the player. OReilly says, “It’s a truly spiritual project and something that I feel I put a lot of myself into in a new way.”

Now he’s working at the nexus of art, film, television and video games, something that’s unusual even in L.A. He wrote, directed and produced “A Glitch Is a Glitch,” an episode of the popular Cartoon Network series Adventure Time. But his big break was getting the gig to direct the animation for the “Alien Child” video game in Her. Multiple people referred him for the job, and Jonze had seen one of OReilly’s films. OReilly initially was brought in as an animation consultant, providing drawings of the Alien Child based on Jonze’s concepts plus 3-D sketches to show how the animation would work with the live action. Inevitably, he ended up supervising the animation sequences, working closely with Jonze for nine months and doing everything from storyboards to team building. It was a technical challenge involving forced perspective and a virtual camera. He had to contact the scientists who make 3-D software to find the best way to achieve the effect. “In the end, the fastest way was still dizzyingly technical,” he says.

“Even though you know how the trick works, it still functions,” he says. “That’s kind of an amazing thing.”

OReilly’s animation has long been influenced by the aesthetics of video games, particularly older games, which didn’t rely as heavily on realism. He

The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality

AS HE FLEW from Orange County to Seattle in September 2013, Brendan Iribe,

the CEO of Oculus, couldn’t envision what the next six months would bring.Most of

all, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook.

That fall Oculus was still just an ambitious startup chasing virtual reality, a dream that had foiled countless entrepreneurs and technologists for two decades. Oculus’ flagship product, the Rift, was widely seen as the most promising VR device in years, enveloping users in Wan all-encompassing simulacrum that felt like something out of Snow Crash or Star Trek. But it faced the same problem that had bedeviled would-be pioneers like eMagin, Vuzix, even Nintendo: It made people want to throw up. This was the problem with virtual reality. It couldn’t just be really good. It had to be perfect. In a traditional videogame, too much latency is annoying—you push a button and by the time your action registers onscreen you’re already dead. But with virtual reality, it’s nauseating. If you turn your head and the image on the screen that’s inches from your eyes doesn’t adjust instantaneously, your visual system conflicts with your vestibular system, and you get sick. There were a million little problems like that, tiny technical details that would need to be solved if virtual reality were ever to become more than a futurist’s fantasy. The Rift had made enough headway to excite long-suffering VR enthusiasts, but it was still a long way from where it needed to be. “This is the first time that we’ve succeeded in stimulating parts of the human visual system directly.” But then Iribe got a call from Michael Abrash, an engineer at Valve; the gaming software company had conducted VR research for a while and had begun collaborating with Oculus. Valve had a new prototype, and it didn’t make people sick. In fact, no one who had tried the demonstration had felt any discomfort. Iribe, who was famously sensitive to VR-induced discomfort—“cold sweat syndrome,” he calls it, or sometimes “the uncomfortable valley”—flew up

to Valve’s offices outside Seattle to be the ultimate guinea pig. Abrash escorted Iribe into a small room tucked off a hallway. The walls and ceilings were plastered with printouts of QR-code-like symbols called fiducial markers; in the corner, a young engineer named Atman Binstock manned a computer. Connected to the computer was Valve’s prototype headset—or at least the very beginnings of a headset, all exposed circuit boards and cables. Iribe slipped it over his head and found himself in a room, the air filled with hundreds of small cubes. He turned his head to look behind him—more floating cubes. Cubes to the left, cubes to the right, cubes overhead, floating away into infinity. Iribe leaned forward and peered around to see the side of the cube closest to him; he crouched and could see its underside. A small camera on the headset was reading the fiducial markers on the (real) wall and using that spatial information to track his position among the (virtual) cubes. Binstock tapped some keys and moved the demo to its next stage. Inside the headset, Iribe stood in a giant chamber, a web browser page on each wall. Iribe picked out a word on the wall across from him and started shaking his head back and forth, rotating as fast as he could, waiting for the word to smear across his vision and make him dizzy. Nothing. In any of Oculus’ own prototype headsets, Iribe would have gotten nauseated long ago, but he was still feeling good. As Binstock continued clicking through the demo, Iribe faded in and out of a series of rooms—bare-bones virtual worlds filled with cubes and spheres. In all of them he took his time, moving, crouching, panning this way and that, taking in his 360-degree surroundings.

In all of them he took his time, moving, crouching, panning this way and that, taking in his 360-degree surroundings. Eventually he came to the grand finale, in which he floated slowly though a vast structure, its interior walls like some glowing mashup of Tron and a Death Star trench. But Iribe couldn’t take his headset off.

and media. Beyond that, though, the company and its technology herald nothing less than the dawn of an entirely new era of communication. Mark Zuckerberg gestured at the possibilities himself in a Facebook post in March when he announced the acquisition: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home.”

“Again,” he said, scarcely able to believe what he was asking for. They ran through the entire series once more. Finally Iribe took off the proto-type. His head felt strange—not dizzy, not displaced, but overwhelmed. “How long was I in there?” he asked Abrash and Binstock.It had been close to 45 minutes. That’s it, Iribe thought. This is going to be bigger than I ever expected. And that’s saying something, because the expectations surrounding the Oculus Rift have always been huge, ever since an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey hacked together a rough proto-type in his parents’ garage in Long Beach, California, in 2011. In June 2012, John Carmack—the legendary founder of id Software, the company that created Doom, Quake, and the entire concept of 3-D gaming—brought that early proto-type to the E3 videogame show, reintro-ducing VR to the popular conversation for the first time since The Lawnmower Man. A year later, Oculus brought an HD proto-type to E3 and blew minds all over again. Then it brought another, even more advanced one to CES this past January. Then another unit to the Game Developers Conference in March.

Luckey’s advances have inspired Sony to announce its own forthcoming VR hardware, for now known only as Project Morpheus. it goes beyond gaming: Developers are producing Rift-enabled tools to let users explore everything from molecules to galaxies. Framestore, a visual effects firm, created a virtual Game of Thrones experience for HBO; Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón has visited Oculus headquarters. Enough Hollywood types have come calling, in fact, that Oculus recently hired a director of film

And finally, the $2 billion purchase by Facebook. All for a company that doesn’t even have a commercial product yet and is chasing a dream that most of the tech community had seemingly given up on decades ago. Oculus has almost single-handedly revived that dream. That’s the true promise of VR: going beyond the idea of immersion and achieving true presence— the feeling of actually existing in a virtual space.“I’ve seen five or six demos that made me think the world was about to change: Apple II, Netscape, Google, iPhone … then Oculus.”That’s because Oculus has found a way to make a headset that does more than just hang a big screen in front of your face. By combining stereoscopic 3-D, 360-degree visuals, and a wide field of view—along with a supersize dose of engineering and software magic—it hacks your visual cortex. As far as your brain is concerned, there’s no difference between experiencing something on the Rift and experiencing it in the real world. “This is the first time that we’ve succeeded in stimulating parts of the human visual system directly,” says Abrash, the Valve engineer. “I don’t get vertigo when I watch a video of the Grand Canyon on TV, but I do when I stand on a ledge in VR.”

Now Oculus is hard at work on its long-awaited headset for consumers, which the company predicts will be released later this year, or more likely early next year, or perhaps even not so early next year. Whenever it comes, we’ll finally have something that has eluded us for more than 30 years: immersive, affordable virtual reality. And we’ll all know what Brendan Iribe knew standing in that room outside

of Seattle. This is going to be bigger than we ever expected. If there’s a checklist for tech wunderkind, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey leaves no box unticked. There’s the shoelessness, for one; he commutes in sandals and regularly pads barefoot around the Oculus offices in Irvine, California. There’s the tousled hair, the anachronistic attachment to his 75-mpg 2001 Honda Insight, the can of vitamin-enriched sparkling blackberry juice seemingly glued to his hand, and the confidence that comes from knowing a lot of things about a lot of things (or possibly from all that juice).

and magnetometer to evaluate head motion. Even better, it takes 1,000 readings a second, allowing it to predict motion and pre-render images, shaving away precious milliseconds of latency.

But most of all, there’s the omnivorous curiosity. As a home-schooled teenager in Southern California, Luckey spent much of his free time tinkering with electronics—modding videogame consoles and repairing iPhones for extra cash, then spending the money on high-powered laser systems and upgrades for his gaming PC. The PC, in particular, became an obsession: Luckey found himself pouring tens of thousands of dollars into it. And soon, a hunt for 3-D monitors became a search for true immersion. As a kid, he’d been entranced by the idea of getting inside the videogames he played on his Gameboy Color. Virtual-world sci-fi like The Matrix and the anime show Yu-Gi-Oh! intensified the desire. Why, he asked himself, can’t we do that yet? His modding and iPhone repair work had left him with a lot of money, so he bought a $400 Vuzix iWear VR920, then the most cutting-edge consumer VR headset—enthusiasts call them HMDs, for head-mounted displays—on the market. Then he moved on to the more expensive eMagin Z800 3DVisor. And he kept looking. Over time, through a combination of government auctions and private resellers, he would spend the money once earmarked for PC upgrades on more than 50 different units, building what he touts as the largest private collection in the world.

The Optics

ANATOMY OF THE RIFT

Luckey figured that he had as good a chance as anyone to solve those problems. So he tinkered, and tinkered some more, and one night in November 2010 he announced to the world—or at least to the message-board denizens of a 3-D-gaming news site called Meant to Be Seen—the existence of PR1 (for Prototype 1), his first stab at a virtual-reality device. It was a cumbersome beast, built on the shell of a headset from his collection. It displayed only in 2-D and was so heavy that it needed a 2-pound counterweight in the back. But thanks to a massive chassis that could fit a nearly 6-inch display, it boasted a

Until now, VR was blurry, buggy, and nauseating. Here’s how Oculus built the first headset good enough to trick your brain. —P.R.

The Brain The biggest challenge in creating realistic VR is getting the image to change with your head movements, precisely and without any perceptible lag. The Rift fuses readings from a gyroscope, accelerometer,

The Display Even the best LCD can take 15 milliseconds for all its pixels to change color. The Rift uses AMOLED screens, which can switch color in less than a millisecond. Oculus also figured out how to deactivate those pixels rapidly so the image doesn’t smear or shake when you whip your head around.

You want an image that fills your entire field of vision without distortion. Typically that requires heavy, expensive lenses. The Rift uses a pair of cheap magnifying lenses, and Oculus developers distort their games so they look right when viewed through the optics.

Positional Tracking Previous VR headsets let you look around but not move around. The Rift’s small external camera monitors 40 infrared LEDs on the headset, tracking motion and letting you crouch, lean, or approach an in-game object. But even these couldn’t give Luckey the immersion he craved. When he put them on, he felt like he was looking at a play space, not living inside of it. “It wasn’t garbage,” Luckey says, “but it wasn’t virtual reality.” The image quality was poor, because the transmissive LCDs weren’t high-contrast. The head-tracking latency was off the charts, causing a nauseating lag every time he turned his head. But most of all, the field of vision was too narrow. He could always see the edge of the screen, which meant his brain could never be truly tricked into thinking it was inside the game.

90-degree field of vision, an angle nearly twice as large as anything else on the market. Over the course of the next 10 months, Luckey kept tinkering, cracking problem after problem. He knew his headset would need a 3-D display, but that meant two screens—projecting slightly different images for each eye—and even with the explosion of smartphone-ready display panels, there simply wasn’t a hi-res panel small enough to fit two side by side in a headset. A few months after announcing the PR1, Luckey was browsing the documentation of a Fujitsu ultramobile PC he owned and noticed that the usable display area was 121 millimeters wide—just about

violence or perspective; they were technological benchmarks, boasting sophisticated bespoke software engines that could make games faster and more immersive than ever before. Like Luckey, Carmack had always been obsessed with making games as lifelike as possible, an interest that had also led him to virtual reality. And like Luckey, he was routinely disappointed in what he found. “There were two broad camps,” he says. “The hardcore academic research people looked down their noses at games. It was all about remote surgery and high-minded things. Then you had the popularizers—pitching the vision, talking about how wonderful it was going to

double the distance between a pair of human eyes. What if I just used half of it for each image? he thought. He put a separate lens over each half of the display, and just like that he had a 3-D prototype. In September 2011, he announced the wireless PR3. The PR5, which he worked on throughout early 2012, had a gargantuan 270-degree field of vision (though it was neither wearable nor remotely practical). By that point, Luckey had become something of a

be, how it was going to change everything, but there wasn’t enough technical acumen to get anything accomplished.”

celebrity on the Meant to Be Seen forums, whose members eagerly awaited his updates.

COURTESY OF CCP GAMES One of those members, it turned out, was John Carmack. The Texas engineer is known as the father of the first-person shooter, but games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D weren’t important just for their

Carmack kept tinkering and eventually wound up on the Meant to Be Seen forums. It was there he learned about Palmer Luckey’s ongoing project. Carmack was intrigued by the kid, especially when Luckey announced in April 2012 that he was building his sixth-generation unit, which he called the Rift. “I based it on the idea that the HMD creates a rift between the real world and the virtual world,” Luckey wrote on the forums, “though I have to admit that it is pretty silly. :)” He wrote that he’d be Kickstarting a DIY kit: He’d mail his backers the parts, which they could assemble themselves. After shelling out for the materials, manufacturing, shipping, and fees, Luckey wrote, he expected that he’d make a grand total of $10 “for a celebratory pizza and beer.” Intrigued, Carmack private- messaged him. Would Palmer consider sending him a loaner unit? Palmer, who idolized Carmack, shipped it off to Texas immediately—“no NDAs, no signing anything,” Carmack says. “It was one of two prototypes that he had.” Carmack got to work on the machine, hot-gluing a motion sensor to it and duct-taping on a ski-goggle strap. But his greatest

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contribution came in the code he wrote for it. The Rift’s biggest selling point was its 90-degree field of view, which Luckey accomplished by slapping a cheap magnifying lens on the display. The problem was, that lens distorted the image underneath, making it warped and uneven. So Carmack coded a version of Doom 3 that pre-distorted the image, counteracting the effects of the magnifying lens and making the picture appear correct to the viewer. The result was a completely immersive gaming experience, the kind that would otherwise require $10,000 in high-end optics.

nervous and lowered the funding threshold from $500,000 to $250,000. Within hours the company blew past both on its way to more than $2.4 million. Since then, the team has made even further headway on some of VR’s most intractable problems. They hired Nirav Patel, an Apple engineer who had been working on a motion tracker that used a gyroscope, accelerom-

Luckey was ecstatic to learn of Carmack’s work—but then Carmack upped the ante. He asked Luckey if he could “show it to some people at E3 in Los Angeles.” “Show it to whoever you want,” Luckey told him. A few weeks later, Luckey was in Boston, attending a trade show about display technology; a friend texted him, asking if he’d seen the article about him. It turned out that what Carmack had meant by “show it to some people” was “take a bunch of meetings with the press to promote virtual reality, the Rift, and Luckey himself.” The reception that the Rift got was rapturous. “The level of immersion was unlike any other gaming experience I’ve ever had,” one site wrote. “It transforms the experience of playing a first-person videogame,” another wrote. “When we look at that now,” Carmack says, “it was clearly the inflection point.” Overnight, the Oculus Rift became the most hotly anticipated gaming device since the Microsoft Kinect. It was time to get serious. Luckey joined forces with an executive team, Iribe among them, and formally established the company—he was now the founder of Oculus VR Inc. They also upped the ambition of their Kickstarter campaign: They would still send DIY kits to their early backers, but they couldn’t expect developers to start building games for a device they had to construct themselves. So they decided to fund a fully assembled product, promising a complete kit to anyone who pledged $300 or more. The campaign video featured some of the most respected people in the gaming industry, like Cliff Bleszinski, then design director of Epic Games, and Valve head Gabe Newell, singing Oculus’ praises. Hours before the campaign went live, Luckey got

eter, and magnetometer to sense players’ head motion. At Oculus, Patel helped design the brain of the Rift, a tracker that sampled motion data so fast that Oculus could use algorithms to predict a player’s head movements and pre-render images, shaving latency by precious milliseconds. Oculus also switched from LCDs to AMOLED displays, allowing the Rift to reduce latency and motion blur simultaneously. The team used a small external camera to track the headset itself, doing away with fiducial markers. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough wasn’t technical at all. In 2013 Carmack decided to leave id Software, where he had worked since cofounding it in 1991, and join the Oculus team as CTO. It was an eyeball-popping PR coup, but it also meant Carmack could dedicate his engineering skills—the same ones that made Doom and Quake such historic landmarks—to improving the Rift. By mid-October, the momentum was unstoppable. That month Iribe stood up at a gaming conference and announced that the Oculus Rift would be a “no-motion-sickness experience.” It was an

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audacious promise, and one that caught the attention of Brian Cho, a young partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who was sitting in the audience. The VC firm had turned down an earlier opportunity to invest in Oculus’ Series A round. After hearing Iribe’s announcement, the firm reached out and asked for another demo. Chris Dixon was among the six Andreessen Horowitz partners who got a look at the new model. “I think I’ve seen five or six computer demos in my life that made me think the world was about to change,” he says. “Apple II, Netscape, Google, i Phone … then

February. When Luckey heard about his interest, he was skeptical. “It’s not the first thing you think,” he says. “‘Wow! Facebook! That’s exactly who I would have imagined to be a good partner!’ So they did run the ring of fire a little bit convincing us.”

Oculus. It was that kind of amazing.” By December, Oculus had closed Series B funding—with Andreessen Horowitz leading—for $75 million. It’s April 3, nine days after Facebook announced its purchase o f Oculus. But not much has changed here at the company’s HQ in Irvine. Luckey, now 21, still rolls into the office around 11 (after which he’ll work a 12-hour day). The common areas are festooned with all things gaming, from framed posters to signed art to oversize Gears of War figurines. The conference rooms are named after pop culture’s greatest virtual reality dreams—Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck, Snow Crash’s Metaverse, Ready Player One’s Oasis. The open kitchen, while bountiful, skews Engineer: cinder-block-sized containers of Red Vines and packets of Kirkland-brand Variety Snacking Nuts make it clear there’s a Costco nearby. Outside, the April morning is as blue and clear as Orange County usually delivers. On the face of things, last week’s acquisition has left the workplace largely untouched.

News Feed into VR?” Instead, the person who showed up was someone Mitchell calls “Visionary Mark Zuckerberg,” who saw virtual reality as not just a gaming tool but as a full-fledged communications platform. The Oculus team agreed; they may have started out trying to build a great gaming device, but they realized now that they were sitting on something much more powerful. Zuckerberg seemed to understand that, and he also seemed to understand that it had potential far beyond being an extension of Facebook’s existing social-media service. “This isn’t about sharing pictures,” Luckey says. “This is about being able to share experiences.” The deal was consummated over an eight-day stretch in mid-March. Iribe was so excited about the acquisition that he revested 100 percent of his own equity for a five-year period, guaranteeing that he’d be with the company for the foreseeable future; Luckey, Carmack, and others took similar steps.

The Facebook deal moved incredibly fast; Zuckerberg first tried on the latest prototype in

Over the course of many conversations during the next several weeks, though, Zuckerberg won Oculus over. “I had heard many times that Mark is a laser beam, that Facebook is all he thinks about day in and day out,” VP of product Nate Mitchell says. “So when I first met with him, I thought he was going to be like, how do we get

But not everyone was so optimistic about the partnership. Within minutes of the announcement, Oculus’ site was filled with angry comments. (The top one read simply: “DO NOT WANT.”) Backers threatened to cancel their pre-orders, to never buy the Rift, to throw their purchasing power behind Sony’s Project Morpheus. Some of this was gamer snobbery, rooted in the assumption that Facebook would dumb down the Oculus experience, loading it with targeted ads and 360-degree 3-D versions of FarmVille. Some of it was fear that their gaming device would wither away in the Facebook catacombs, forgotten by a young billionaire

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mogul with buyer’s remorse. And some of it was the fury of backers spurned, people who had ponied up to support the original Kickstarter campaign, only to see their investments made irrelevant by a deep-pocketed corporation. But the Oculus team argues that, far from threatening the device’s future, Facebook is helping to secure it. “Every VR product has been a failure,” Luckey says. “Nobody lending money for manufacturing looks at Oculus and says ‘I can loan you $250 million!’ Because they know the safe bet is we’re going to fail, go bankrupt, and take hundreds of millions of

Oculus is also working on a second, outward-facing camera that will be part of the headset itself. The Valve prototype used such a camera to read fiducial markers on the walls for tracking, but Oculus seems to intend it for very different applications. For one, Carmack says, it can function as a passthrough camera, allowing Rift-wearing users to see what’s happening in the real world—a kind of external heads-up display that would allow you to grab a soda, for instance. But it has other, much more interesting potential uses. Right now the Rift allows players to look around a virtual world; to move through it, they use an Xbox controller. But a

dollars with us.” Now Oculus doesn’t have to worry about getting loans at all. And Facebook’s backing has helped the company attract people from top game studios. Within a week of the acquisition announcement, Michael Abrash, the Valve engineer who spearheaded that company’s VR research, became Oculus’ chief scientist—joining colleague Atman Binstock, who’d gone to Oculus earlier in March. Along with a third former Valve engineer, Aaron Nicholls, they are working at an Oculus R&D lab in the Seattle area.

front-facing camera might allow the Rift to someday track users’ gestures instead—like a Kinect, but more powerful. “In the early days of VR, it was all goggles and gloves,” Carmack says. “Nobody’s talking about gloves now—it’s going to be done with optical tracking. You want it to feel like a virtuoso with an instrument.” Add haptic feedback, which the company is also developing, and you’ve taken a giant step toward achieving true presence. Players will be able to engage with virtual worlds—and have those worlds engage back—unencumbered.

Facebook’s money also means that Oculus doesn’t need to worry about turning an immediate profit—and that will come in handy as it builds its first consumer product. “Let’s say we’re trying to pack in everything we can for $300,” Mitchell says. If the device needs to be profitable, then the company couldn’t spend much more than $100 on the hardware itself. But now that it doesn’t need to preserve its profit margin, Mitchell says, “you can take all of that margin money, apply it to components, and still keep the price exactly the same.” In fact, according to Luckey, the consumer version will be “higher-quality in every aspect” than the proto type that Valve showed Iribe last year. While Oculus’ internal units have used twin AMOLED 1080p displays from Samsung Galaxy S4s, the company no longer has to depend on the mobile phone ecosystem; it now has the money and the backing to ask a manufacturer to create custom displays specifically for VR applications.

But what those worlds look like isn’t up to Oculus—it’s up to partners and developers creating the experiences that we’ll have within the Rift. And already they’re finding that the future of virtual reality might not look like anything we’ve been led to expect. The gamer fantasy of VR tends to involve a full-body first-person shooter—dropping players into the middle of a Call of Duty or Titanfall death match. But that’s not going to happen for a while: Photorealistic games of today simply can’t be rendered at the frame rate that current VR technology demands. Instead, Carmack says, much as Angry Birds defined iPhone

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gaming, Oculus’ first breakouts will take advantage of the unique properties of the medium. And that presents an opportunity for independent developers. “The magic is not in the 6,000-line GPU shader that’s going to make a highlight just right,” Carmack says, but in designing games that could have run on a less powerful computer: “It’s not like good games are only made when you can throw teraflops of performance at them.” For now programmers need to concentrate on the simpler aspects of a game—how motion works, for example—rather than the crazy visual pyrotechnics. Otherwise you’re just slapping pretty icing on a cake that no one can eat.

Teleconferencing is another idea in the works. It’s easy to imagine strapping on a Rift and finding yourself across a table from someone who is actually thousands of miles away (or at least you’ll be across from their avatar). Oculus has VR Chat prototypes in the works, and a demo that Epic Games unveiled in March allows two players wearing Rifts to interact with each other’s avatars in the same virtual living room. “The key,” Abrash says, “is generating the cues that tell us we’re in a real place in the presence of another person: eye motion, facial expressions, body language, voice, gestures. Getting all that working perfectly is a huge task, but getting it to be good enough to be widely useful may be quite doable.”

That’s just one way in which the logic of mainstream gaming may not pertain to the Oculus. For instance, fast-twitch human locomotion—the kind of running and jumping that Carmack pioneered with Doom— becomes overwhelming in VR. (Oculus found that new users are most comfortable moving through virtual environments at real-world speeds and has lit on 1.4 meters per second as the optimal walking rate.) Similarly, some of the most popular games being shared among developers and early adopters are simulators, in which players drive or parachute or roller-coaster through an otherwise static world but don’t move themselves. That’s a limited approach, but Binstock says that more profound interactions are much harder to design, and they risk breaking the illusion of immersive reality that has been so crucial to Oculus’ success so far. “Presence is fragile,” Binstock says. “It’s very easy to do things that break the feeling of being somewhere.” That could be something technical like a dropped frame that interrupts a fluid game experience or a simple aesthetic flaw, like an environmental object that looks too flat. Earlier this year Oculus prepared a 42-page best-practices document, enumerating dozens of design guidelines to help developers avoid such pitfalls. “Consider having your interface elements as intuitive and immersive parts of the 3-D world,” reads one. “Ammo count might be visible on the user’s weapon rather than in a floating HUD.” In the past, environmentally integrated game design like this was seen as a perk; on the Rift, it’s a must. But, as Zuckerberg predicted, games are just the beginning. VR could easily change the way we consume media. Early on, Oculus showcased a VR Cinema application that lets users sit in a virtual empty movie theater and watch Man of Steel on a full-size screen. “Last time I was sick with the flu,” Carmack says, “I just lay in bed and watched VR movies on the ceiling.”

The list of potential uses goes on. Bring a classroom full of kids inside any museum in the world—no lines, no price of admission. Hell, that goes for vacations too. Even getaways of the mental variety: Why spring for a shaman-guided ayahuasca trip in Peru when you can dive into a drug-free epiphany anytime you want? And let’s not even talk about the oft-predicted sex simulators. “Hardware, while essential, is just an enabler,” Abrash says. “In the end, the future of VR lies in the unique, compelling experiences that get created in software, and if I knew what those would be, even in broad outline, I would be very happy. Right now we don’t even know what kind of artwork and rendering techniques work in VR, much less what experiences.”And that, more than anything, points toward the challenges that lie ahead. New experiences are under development at this very moment—and each one may well require the same ingenuity, the same willingness to forge an entirely new visual language, that Luckey and his team have called on to get the Rift where it is today. The hardware problems have been solved, the production lines are almost open, and the Rift will be here soon. After that it’s anybody’s guess. “I’ve written 2 million lines of code over the past 20 years, and now I’m starting from a blank page,” Carmack says. “But the sense that I’m helping build the future right now is palpable.”

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VIRTUALITY REALITY

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Can someone prove to me that we aren’t in a dream?

Are we spend our lifetimes living inside someone’s dream?

uite possible. If we are in someones dream, then the person dreaming us might also be a part of somebody’s dream. How we perceive the outside world (and also ourselves) depends not on how or what the world actually is, but how we see it. Reality is what we perceive it to be. Just pinch yourself and see; they say you wake up with the sensation of pain. But there’s no way to find whether you are real or just a caricature of someone else’s imagination. But here are several facts to know we are real: 1. The person dreaming us will have to be a super human to discover all the theories of physics, mathematics in his imagination, not just that, he will have to be a mastermind to build religions and characters like Napoleon, Einstein, Freud. If you go to the library and start browsing

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through the books, you will find so many things that NOT one person can imagine all by himself. There are so many subjects, so much to learn, so many theories, so much to think about, had it been a dream, the person’s mind would have exploded creating the contents of those books. 2. The person dreaming would have a certain social level, a certain designation, some experiences, a poor person can never dream about what he would actually do when he becomes rich in so much detail, of course there’s television to give him that knowledge, but a person who spends his entire life in chilly winters CANNOT know what a summer feels like. A person living in one part of the globe, say Africa, will never know what live is, in say London. But then you see people living different lives in different parts of the world, hard to come out of a single person’s mind. Its quite impossible to create this world in so much detail.

Sources list: 1. “Hikkikomori”: BBC www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23182523

2. “Are we approaching a gen Y identity crisis ?”: Molly Flatt www.mollyflatt.co.uk/2015/06/14/ are-we-approaching-a-gen-y-identity-crisis/ 3. “Interview with Fatima Alquadiri”: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/05/ fatima-al-qadiri-interview-kuwait-invasion-saddam 4. “When day dreaming replaces real life”: The atlantic www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/ when-daydreaming-replaces-real-life/391319/ 5. “Miley Cyrus: my gender identity is fluid”: Hollywood Life www.hollywoodlife.com/2015/06/09/miley-cyrus-gender-identity-fluid-boy-girl-paper-magazine-interview/ 6. “Dior Eyes for backstage access”: Virtual reality reporter www.virtualrealityreporter.com/ dior-eyes-virtual-reality-headst-vr-fashin/ 7. “Living in second life”: The Economist www.economist.com/node/7963538 8. “Interview with Takeshi Murata”: Art Practical www.artpractical.com/column/ interview-with-takeshi-murata/

10. “Could this creepy robot be the answear to eternal life ?”: Daily Mail www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2942582/ Could-creepy-robot-answer-eternal-life-Technologyallow-people-upload-minds-computers.html 11. “The Universe might be a giant hologram”: TGdaily www.tgdaily.com/space-features/82501-the-universemight-be-a-hologram 12. “Architecture post internet”: 032c www.032c.com/2015/architecture-post-internet/ 13. “The mountain by David O’reilly”: La weekly www.laweekly.com/arts/in-david-oreillys-videogame-you-dont-fight-anything-youre-just-a-mountain-4824344 14. “The inside story of oculus rift”: Wired www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/ 15. “Can someone prove to me that we aren’t in a dream ?”: Quora www.quora.com/Can-someone-prove-to-me-that-wearent-in-a-dream-Is-it-possible-that-we-spend-ourlifetimes-living-inside-someones-dream 16. Cool movies / books / games / fanpages / music videos / : Wikipedia.com / Youtube.com / Facebook.com

9. “Julie Watai”: Ignition www.ignition.co/317

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