Two Sides of the Same Wing

André Blas photographed me working with wings today. This picture shows two sides of the same spectacular wing.

And I can't help but notice the resemblance to Inchy.

Presentation at O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Expo

I had a great time presenting yesterday at Gov 2.0 Expo. I spoke about cities of the future, specifically Loveland, a project in Detroit where the Imagination Age network is currently creating a neighborhood.

NPR on Loveland: Click here.

The Map of the Imagination Age network's 1000 inches in Loveland's first colony, Plymouth.

Augmented Reality Gaming Company Secures $3.5 Million in Venture Capital

Ogmento is the "first augmented reality gaming company" to secure venture capital.

As we've been blogging for the past year, Augmented Reality (and Gaming), are the new technologies to watch. Apparently the investment community has been watching as well. Ogmento, run by Ori Inbar, just announced today that they've secured $3.5 million in venture capital investment, which, according to their press release, makes them the first Augmented Reality Gaming Company to secure venture capital investment.

Tish Shute, the Internet's premiere cool hunter, interviewed Ori Inbar on her blog last summer.

For more perspective, see Bruce Sterling's powerful avisement about the future and responsibility of Augmented Reality.

[Ogmento raises $3.5 million in series a funding from chart Venture Partners]

Video Games, Virtual Worlds and Controlling Dreams

A new study is reporting that "playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control of their dreams."

Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.

"If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice," said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. "Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams."

Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests

NextGen Mobile Phones to use "Imaginary Interface"

If you thought the iPhone and all the other touch-based mobile phones were cool, how about phones you don't even have to touch at all?

Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Postdam, Germany, and his research student, Sean Gustafson, are developing a prototype interface for mobile phones that requires no touch screen, keyboard, or any other physical input device. A small video recorder and microprocessor attached to a person's clothing can capture and analyze their hand gestures, sending an outline of each gesture to a computer display.

The idea is that a person could use an "imaginary interface" to augment a phone conversation by tracing shapes with their fingers in the air.

[Technology Review: An Invisible Touch for Mobile Devices]

Thanks Jody!

Two Beautiful Second Life Machinima

It seems that every few weeks someone either tells me, or I read a news story about, Second Life being empty or on the verge of closing. And, yet, the people inside Second Life continue making and producing incredible new worlds to explore.

For those readers who are still unfamiliar with Second Life, everything you see inside Second Life is created by the people who use it. Today I submit two new machinima videos produced by Second Life machinimist Toxic Menges. These are videos filmed inside Second Life; places I'm going to go explore.

Amazing.

Map of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland

Loveland continues to grow, inch by inch, and the Imagination Age Network in Loveland has now been mapped!

The Eight Zones are named for the aspects of the Eightfold Path. Each member of the network receives an address within one of the zones.

In the map above, the thin purple rectangle represents 40 inches of shared space. This shared space will include all elements that can be found in any community--with a twist. Eventually the network will create multiple shared assets including a Theater of the Future, The Imagination Age School, and a store. The image directly above is the banner for the store, which will soon be open for business.

Battery Dance Company: Cultural Relations through Dance

Battery Dance Company performs at Space on White. Video by Rita J. King

The Imagination Age is thrilled to be collaborating with Battery Dance Company on a new cultural relations project.

The above short documentary was recorded and produced by Rita J. King as part of Battery Dance's May 14 participation in Space on White, a new collaborative art space in Tribeca in New York City. The video is a montage of a series of interpretive dances featuring Battery Dancers Oliver Tobin, Robin Cantrell, Carmen Nicole and Sean Scantlebury who joined forces with visual artists John Kessler, Prawat Laucharoen and Jody Rasch to present site-specific dance at Space on White. Also featured in the video is Battery Dance's Artistic and Executive Director, Jonathan Hollander.

We first met Jonathan at a Cultural Diplomacy retreat at White Oak Plantation where we learned that Jonathan's efforts go well beyond providing a home for modern, independent dance in Lower Manhattan, but around the globe in some of the most remote corners of the world exploring how dance can serve as a bridge for cultural relations.

Jonathan's commitment to cultural collaboration is local as well. He was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal about his participation in the creation of the Lower Manhattan Arts League, an effort to create more synergies between arts organizations in New York City.

Battery Dance Company's impact and reach, finding inroads for cultural dialog through teaching and sharing dance has, in the last year, gone from, among other places, Uganda to Ghana and Algeria. The below clip is from the YouTube stream of the US Embassy in Algiers.


Battery Dancers were recently interviewed on Algerian television.

I asked Jonathan a question I saw tweeted recently by one of the British Council's TN2020 fellows: "Some dance forms imply a set of values, esp in the south side of chicago. So, how do you find neutral forms for dialogue?"

His response: "I guess my reaction to this 'neutral forms for dialogue' is that modern dance fits the bill perfectly because it is a constantly changing, evolving form that can stretch in all kinds of directions. For example, when we gave young dancers the opportunity to be creative within the form and architecture of modern dance, they dove into the process … in Cambodia, Ghana, Algeria, Uganda, Swaziland, Germany, Taiwan, New York City public schools."

[Battery Dance Company]
[Battery Dance Company Blog]

Lady Blue Shanghai

David Lynch directed this short film, Lady Blue Shanghai, for Dior.

I love the suspense as Marion Cotillard drifts down the hall toward the music in room 815.

Oddly, my recent six-country, three-week trip included a volcano, the Cyclades, an orchestra of goat bells AND a recurring Dior theme in the most unexpected places, like a J'adore bottle showing up at an ancient cathedral and a completely misplaced advertisement on the wall of ship bound for Bilbao.

J'adore in Sifnos by André Blas.

(thanks, @jahfurry!)

Alan Wake: A Review

Finally, a video game about a writer! Alan Wake, in a tweed blazer with leather elbow-patches. He must be a writer! And he is--a famous one at that. When he finds himself in a diner, the waitress introduces herself Misery-style by announcing that she's his biggest fan and has the cardboard cut-out of him left behind after his book signing to prove it.

Wait. Alan Wake brings a life sized cardboard cut-out of himself to book signings and yet...

"The waitress was giving me a headache," he says in his low deadpan. "Overeager fans always do."

The game looks promising from the teaser, which looks just like a movie trailer, right down to the glowing blurbs.


Right away, it's strange to be playing a male character, because it makes me feel as if I'll be less attached to the outcomes of my decisions. This turns out not to matter for two reasons.

1) Alan is apparently on his way to a lighthouse in the first scene, which starts off when he hits somebody in a car. I'm still a little hung up on the car crash when Alan starts lurking around on a rickety bridge that I hope will eventually connect to the lighthouse. All I know is that I, or, I mean, Alan, needs to get there. But he himself has already said he doesn't remember why he's going there. So what do I care what's waiting there for him? I don't even know who he is. The car crash pretty much knocked the stars out of my eyes from when I got all misty over the elbow-patches and literary bent of Alan Wake.

2) Unlike other narrative games like Mass Effect (which I don't play because I'm completely incapable of managing the controller in a battle scene), this game just barks orders and offers no real option for shaping Alan Wake's ethics. Would I rather decide if I'm in the mood to be a hero or a villain, or somewhere along the bland median between, or let the writers do it or me? Both could be fun.

I think I lost interest in Alan Wake right away because his problems turned out to be so typically male. Maniac enemies with axes manifested almost instantly. I had been hoping for a more metaphysical and poetic challenge.

Ultimately, I only played for a few minutes before stopping to feverishly blog because the Mass Effect problem (user error) brought me to my knees. Poor Alan Wake, running into the same dark wooden bridge over and over again on his way to the lighthouse for some reason that shall forever remain a mystery. I can only hope, in a parallel reality in someone else's den, his story gets played out to its crashing denouement and a thrilling conclusion.

Favela Painting

Last week we blogged about how Detroit artist Marianne Burrows transformed the exterior of the Imagination Age Salon. A pair of Dutch artists, Haas&Hahn have set the bar even higher: Transforming the slums of Rio de Janeiro with apartment-building-sized murals.

Springwise Reports:

The brainchild of Dutch artist duo Haas&Hahn, Favela Painting has already completed two community painting projects in Vila Cruzeiro—Rio's most notorious slum—along with the first portion of O Morro, its current effort to paint an entire hillside slum. Some 34 houses and 7,000 square meters of Praça Cantão in Santa Marta have already been transformed through paint, and the project hopes to return later this year to paint even more of the hillside. In each of its projects, Favela has focused on recruiting local residents to do much of the painting, including training and paying them. In this latest one, local inhabitants were trained through a partnership with Brazilian paint company TintasCoral on everything from different types of paint to safety measures while working on scaffolding.

Dre Urhahn, one of the Favela Painting artists, explains: “This work of art can make a colorful difference in the lives of local individuals, the community and the city of Rio. It has the potential of working as a catalyst in the processes of social renewal and change.”

[Favela Painting]
Follow Favela Painting on Twitter. (Thanks Jody!)

IBM CEO Study: Leading in an Interconnected World

IBM's much-anticipated 2010 CEO report releases today against the backdrop of global economic transformation, massive increases in predictive analytics, continuing rapid evolution and integration of social media:

What external impacts do CEOs expect to loom largest in the coming years, and how does geography factor into those perspectives? How can CEOs use the information explosion to their advantage? In an increasingly interconnected world, which leadership qualities and management actions and styles enabled certain organizations to outperform their peers over both the long term and the short term?

Beginning today at 11 am Eastern: Rita J. King, IBM Innovator-in-Residence at the Virtual Analytics Center will be participating and speaking about the study in two virtual worlds: An event in Second Life hosted by SmarterTechnology, which you can watch here on the web or join live in Second Life; and at the IBM Virtual Analytics Center (accessible via the web).

You can view a digital book on the report here, and download the executive summary here.

IBM is replaying archived videos of a cross-platform discussion around the release here.

[CEO Study: Capitalizing on Creativity]

[The 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study]

Free Cab Ride for a Story

Retired Cultural Relations officer, Thomas M. Martin who died April 29, 2010.

At The Imagination Age, we are firm believers in the importance of storytelling as vehicle for both good cultural relations, excellent games, and the evolution of meaningful work. And so it was that we read the poignant obituary of Thomas M. Martin a retired US foreign service officer who worked in the cultural relations division, then-called the USIA, sent to us by email list-maven Len Baldyga. These two grafs speak for themselves.

During his overseas assignments, one adventure followed the other. From being taken hostage in Bolivia, unexpected bull fighting in Colombia, treks to the base of Angel Falls in Venezuela, week long hunting trips in Paraguay and Botswana, horse treks across the tundra in Iceland, working with Bobby Kennedy in Venezuela, receiving several civilian medals/honors for his service in Vietnam from 1967 - 1969, the attack and burning of his office in Pakistan and to the countless other known and unknown experiences. Tom lived a full and active life.

Following retirement on August 1986 and in his efforts to regain the domestic pulse, Tom received a Taxi License and drove a cab in the Washington D.C. area, refusing patron's fare in the place of hearing their stories. ...

To know a culture, you need to be willing to listen to its stories. After years overseas, Tom realized the best way to get back in touch with the pulse of US culture, was to listen to its stories.

Engaging Technology: A History and Future of Intermedia

Engaging Technology Exhibition Introduction from IDIA on Vimeo.

Imagination Age collaborator, John Fillwalk refers us to this video produced by his design studio at Ball State University, IDIA. Fillwalk and his team built the Flickr Gettr, which factored heavily into the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project. He is an intermedia and video Artist and a professor at Ball State University. It's a great piece.

A Man in a Woman's Body: Virtually

Researchers at Barcelona University projected men's sense of self into virtual reality females. The participants felt like they embodied the female form and even flinched when she was slapped.

The Mural at the Imagination Age Salon

Last weekend, the Imagination Age Salon hosted the Loveland team, and they arrived with a Detroit artist, Marianne Burrows, who had never been to NYC before. I'm still editing the videos from the weekend-long Loveland jam, but this video of Marianne painting a mural deserves the spotlight on its own first.

Marianne, as she describes here, paints "mental landscapes." She captured my mental landscape perfectly with this mural, which juxtaposes the energy of the location perfectly--an urban landscape against a wild bloom of rhododendrons and other massive spring flowers in profusion.

And best of all, after a picture of Marianne painting was posted online, she was commissioned by someone in Brooklyn to come back in June and do another painting.

Anyone Can Find You

Spokeo.com lets you search on anyone for private information. You're probably on the list. Search for yourself then click on the "privacy" tab and go from there if you want to remove yourself. Spokeo.com "cares about data privacy," and as such offers services from an outfit called Reputation Defender to let you pay to keep your private information private. But from whom? And really, for how long until another Spokeo.com crops up?

The combination of Spokeo.com and Google maps probably makes Mark Zuckerberg snicker about the slender sliver of the population concerned about privacy these days.

Thanks for the tip Erica Driver!

Business Innovation Factory: Sparking Imagination through storytelling

When Chris Flanagan invited me to tell a story at the Business Innovation Factory's Collaborative Innovation Summit, her exquisite taste in good stories was immediately apparent. Her favorite storyteller of all time happens to be Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

This isn't a panel, or a five-minute lightning talk with slides to back up my thesis. This is telling a story... not just any old story! It has to be new. Personal. Real. It has to have scope and depth. Like a lightning bolt.

Here's how Chris describes it:

Now in our sixth year, BIF-6 is much more a conversation than a conference. Over two days, more than two dozen people will take the stage and replace canned presentations with something personal. There are absolutely no panels or talking heads, no infomercials or powerpoints, just very personal stories from people who combine passion, creativity, smarts and discipline to get things done in new and valuable ways. The format is really energizing and a refreshing break from standard operating procedure. In the end, we’ll bring together 350 serious-minded/fun-loving technologists, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, designers, educators, business executives and social entrepreneurs to learn from and engage with one another.

I will be in extremely good company. Other storytellers include:
• Richard Saul Wurman, TED founder, author and information architect
• John Rinn, genomic origamist, assistant professor pathology, Harvard Medical School
• Ben Berkowitz, founder and CEO, SeeClickFix.Com
• Sayantani DasGupta, physician, writer, narrative medicine scholar
• Jason Fried, founder, 37Signals
• Steven Johnson, author, The Invention of Air and founder, Outside.In
• Richard Leider, founder and chairman of The Inventure Group
• John Maeda, president, Rhode Island School of Design
• Lisa Hsia, executive vice president, Bravo TV
• Peter Hartwell, senior researcher and director of HP Labs Central Nervous System for the Earth project
• Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos
• Gerard van Grinsven, CEO, Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital
• Alan Webber, author, journalist and co-founder, Fast Company magazine
• Keith Yamashita, author and founder, Stone Yamashita Partners

More information, including videos of all past storytellers, can be found here.

But what kind of story should I tell? I asked Chris if there are any guidelines and she responded with a brilliant list of suggestions.

1. Has your idea, innovation, or effort been actualized (and not just a good idea swimming in your head)? There are plenty of great idea conferences out there that present ideas about what the future might hold. That’s not us. We’re looking for stories about things that have actually happened – successfully or not. Stories of failure are welcome too. Because innovation comes from experimentation – and you usually can’t get there without making mistakes along the way.

2. Is your story a first-hand account? People who take our stage are storytellers – not story re-tellers. Which means you typically won’t find consultants on our stage.

3. Is it truly innovative? Did you challenge the norm? Resist tradition? Create new value? Our summit stories are not about incremental innovation. People come to be blown away.

4. Can you get personal? Can you share something that hasn't been shared before?

5. Can you tell a great story? It’s sad but true: Sometimes people with great stories just can’t tell them really well. Storytelling is a language art that predates written history; it uses words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination. To make it to the stage, you need to be able to relay your innovation in a compelling, unique and original way. And oh yeah, you’ll only have 15 minutes on stage to do it.

Wow!

I think I've got my story, but I've never told it in public before.

And yes, it's personal.

I wonder if I'll be brave enough to tell it. I hope that I am. I'll keep you posted.

HUSTLE! 48HR on MagCloud

I just bought the premiere issue of 48HR from MagCloud, "a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, we wrote, photographed, illustrated, designed, and edited a magazine in two days. From noon on May 7th through noon on the 9th, a team circled up around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones' offices to transform 1,502 submissions from around the world into a chorus of voices, all harmonizing around the same theme: hustle. 48 Hour Magazine features 60 pages of writers and artists from your favorite magazines sharing space with previously unpublished new talent, shaped by some of the best editors in the business. You're going to love it."

Brilliant journalist Alexis Madrigal was involved.

"It was just a lucky throw of the dice," he says. "People got into it and it was awesome."

I can't wait until it arrives!

Genghis Khan and Mark Zuckerberg

I would add one more item to the Social Node post comparing Khan and Zuckerberg. Genghis Khan became a character in one of the best books ever written, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Zuckerberg will be portrayed in Facebook: The Movie, featuring Justin Timberlake.

Any more you can think of?

Jason Silva in Vanity Fair and other Loveland News

The Imagination Age Network is located on 1000 square inches in the Plymouth Colony of Loveland in Detroit. The mixed-media, mixed-reality experiment in shared ownership of micro real-estate is defining what it means to be part of a modern community.

Jason Silva wrote this provocative piece for Vanity Fair which explores the theme of his inch of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland: Turning Into Gods.

He was the newest member of the Imagination Age network until last night, when Josh Fox joined us after the premiere of his magnificently moving new play, Reconstruction. Josh Fox wrote and directed Surrender, which blew me away. He is also the filmmaker behind the HBO doc Gasland, premiering on June 21.

"Reconstruction" asks the question, "If you could build any kind of house, any kind of town, any kind of country, what would you build?"

That is the same question asked by the Loveland project, where the Imagination Age Network is building a neighborhood in Detroit, and in the infinite cosmos, or at least as big as our collective imaginations can make it.

With Josh Fox, we will be exploring the theater of the future.

Jason Silva in The Imagination Age "Intentions: 128"

When Jason Silva sent me the concept teaser for "Turning Into Gods" (see below for video) I was struck by the scope of the thought and his enthusiasm for a subject that has kept me staring at the ceiling many nights since before I even started grade school:

Is immortality possible? Can science put an end to death?

Jason Silva seems certain that the answer is yes. Looking ahead for a moment...let's say we get there. Envision a place where consciousness is re-engineered without the turmoil of the mortal coil...

But will we ever truly be immune to hazard, even if the singularity is reached?

One line grabbed me particularly:

"Imagination," Silva says, "allows us to think beyond our limitations to conceive of what might be and go further than we ever thought possible."

I invited him to become a member of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland, an experiment in Detroit created by Jerry Paffendorf. Loveland explores new concepts about community and the micro-ownership of shared real estate. Loveland is 1,000,000 square inches in all, made up of individual colonies. The first colony, Plymouth, is 10,000 square inches and has 588 "inchvestors." The Imagination Age Network is a 1000-inch neighborhood in Plymouth. Our goal is to see how big we can make an inch.

The yellow rectangle is the Imagination Age Network in Plymouth, shown amid the parcels of 588 other inchvestors. For more information about Loveland, click here.

Jason Silva's inch is called "Turning Into Gods." He chose the address "Intentions: 128" for his project. The Imagination Age network is divided into eight shared zones of 122 inches each. Intentions, the second zone, includes inches 123-245.

The first step in growing Jason's project is to watch the video below and leave comments on this blog post with your thoughts on possibility, science and technology, a grand unfolding instigated by humans, and, oh yeah, "making ourselves permanent."

TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from
jason silva on Vimeo.