Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago

In a booth at Ted’s Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web was becoming a thing, and we thought that the 3-D web could be just a few tweaks down the road. […] Link

Cross Record Live at KUTX, 2016

CAVE EXITS (installation preview)

Peter Burr and Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s 4-channel video installation Cave Exits (recalling both Hans Blumenberg’s ‘Höhlenausgänge’ and a history of cave exploration videogames) explores biology and architecture through a trans lens in a game-like zone with mutable parameters. Informed by both game and cinematic conventions, the project illuminates the challenges of both the world-building and self-building drives of game design and transness, and suggests an alternative to the ideas of completeness and stasis in both constructed world and constructed self.

Velocity

Velocity by Karolina Glusiec

I always thought I had a perfect memory. I wanted to show these drawings to you.

shapes phone tree

I always bring up the Shapes (and Other Shapes) installation/performance I did with The Octopus Project and Everest Pipkin because it was probably the most fully realized non-movie art piece I’ve worked on in the wild before I started art school. One part of the show was a phone tree you could call that I built with the old ruby version of Tinsel. The phone tree was big and let the caller hear recorded and text to speech audio from Everest’s text generator output. This application had been running on Heroku for years and you could still call and play with it. Recently Heroku forced moving to a new VM, which required a newer version of Ruby. Updating ruby for the application was a nightmare of sorting out package dependencies, but after a day of futzing with it I got the dependencies worked out and was able to push to heroku and have the application build. But now when you call you get a voice saying “an application has occurred”. This all happened right around the time I really would have liked to have it still working to show at a talk I was giving.

critical retrocomputing + reposting Rachel's talk at MagFest

I had to give a 10 minute talk yesterday in front of the faculty and cohort of my department on my art practice (Do I have an art practice? I guess I do). What seemed like a simple task went south on me kind of quickly as I raced through topics trying to stay within the time limit. Probably no one really cared but me, but all last night I found myself thinking “Why did I say that? Why didn’t I say that?”