Post-It Notes from the Fringe ----------------------------- Maintenant, pour le reportage... Hey, congrads on the k00Lest Pix #3! Twas brillig and a great time we had at the VRASP party @ Meckler's/San Jose this September. Pizza, schmooz, Intel party crashing and even a glimpse of Swimsuit Karin!!! Down boy... All those fine folx from Ono-Sendai who crashed our fete to bemuse and befuddle with their super-super-secret-hush-shush consumer VR project. Dave Blackburn of the VR Sig in LA who dee-lited all with his brewing virtual ventures at Kit Galloway's Electronic Cafe. So when is that cyberspace wedding Dave bragged about? Better yet, where/when's the virtual bachelor(ette) party?!? Really wanted to tag along with you cybermutants to the D'Cuckoo show in SF, 'specially after chatting with Linda Jacobsen, Leigh Shipley & Timothy Childs, but alas my DNA-unit got dragged across the waters to Birklee, to go slam dancing Dickies-style with a certain St. Jude and the notorious Eric Hughes of recent hacker/crypto-anarchy fame. They of course stomped my lil' toesies to shreds. And yours truly is still trying to recover from Sense8's Eric Gullichsen ranting up/down/around the M2 office 'bout how much I've started to look like Charlie Manson these days. East Bay is like that, you know... Cyberspace will never be the same. Speaking of which, my SW Airlines aerial-cattle-truck touched down in time for me to stumble/limp/shuffle/saunter (ref. prev. para.) into the first annual Textures In Cyberspace discussion panel at Austin's High Time Brain Gym. Anna Couey was in town for the NAAO art conference, so she graciously opted to singe us local wireheads with hot news from the brewing international art scene. Together with Allucquere Stone from UT/Austin's Virtual Systems center, her accomplice Dick Cutler who's been researching MUD's, Marcos Novak of Liquid Architecture fame, and Vernon Reed of Cybernetic Jewelry, a capacity crowd hosted by Mondo 2000's Jon Lebkowsky interrogated Anna & company about the cyber side of art happenings. Issues addressed on the panel and during the next day's follow-up NAAO cyber session: - how aesthetics influence collaboration, i.e. lack of ownership for online projects - what happens to specific cultures as we interact more online - ArtFax, the cyberarts Net for people who don't even have modems - issues of privilege, loss of common access due to rising education costs - guides to Internet access by Matrix News' John S. Quarterman As you might guess, our new US veep, Al Gore, is regarded quite well in these circles :-) Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, provides "an electronic meeting place, or information commons" where artists exchange email, access libraries and archives, find out about available grants, look-up maps of regional resources, etc. The goal is to make it as low-end, common-denominator as possible to lend access to a large community of artists. "Text is the most democratic medium at this point," sez Anna. Interest Groups (you'd love this part KA!) focus on multiculturalism, social and political areas, as well as collectives for group work. Anna is a very compelling and lucid speaker, simply abuzz with ideas and action. For more info, please contact: Anna Couey, Arts Wire Network Coordinator 1077 Treat San Francisco, CA 94110 +1 415 826 6743 couey@tmn.com Another newsblip on the cyberspatial weather scope is the emerging SFNet in the Bay Area. OK, Ok, mebbe it's been there a while, but had U heard much about this B4? Seems that whenever you drop by the local cafe to score a fix of 'feine, you can also plop 50 cents into a table-top-Packman-unit that's actually a BBS terminal. So now it seems that all walks of Californicators go online while sipping espresso. What a weird twist. People meet up in virtual forums to discuss their interests and concerns, for the meager cost of what one can beg off tourists. Funny anecdotes arise, like the two adoring chess partners who play online, then finally meet to find one's an MD and the other is homeless. Class structures thrust into chaos, etc. Kudos to the WELL's elusive cybernaut Magdalen/Tiffany/Molly for introducing me to this fine party, and for the great coffee too. Back to Allucquere Stone and Dick Cutler, the Dept of Communications at UT/Austin has gone exponential into VR studies. Prof. Stone had been leading similar projects at UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz, at least until the allures of AusTex snaggered her attentions. Now there's an intro seminar for Interactive Multimedia which UT students ardently vie to get into. It's interdisciplinary, it's multicultural, it's chaotic, it's happening. Momentum is building for a world-class program among VR academia. Yours truly has just signed on as a technical consultant, ie. I get to install the new system upgrades on all the spanking brand new Mac Quadra 950's! Allucquere, who lists research interests as "the structure of desire and power in social systems constituted through communication technologies", also helps organize the International Conference on Cyberspace - better known as 3Cyberconf - tis gonna be in Austin next year: 3CYBERCONF May 14-15, 1993 School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, 78712 +1 512 471 6619 +1 512 471 0176 fax 3cyberconf@bongo.cc.utexas.edu Hey, there's also the main VR event this side of Silicon Valley, RoboFest IV, which will be in the May 93 timeframe. Austin's Robot Group hosts a free-for-all of DIY robotics and VR tech, with a bias toward childrens' entertainment and education. More news to come. I will say this, an offshoot of the Robot Group known as the Venus Project has been tearing up the local rave scene with their performance VR and hands-on cyberspace by employing Vivid Effect's Mandala and some rather unique video/music programming. Shall we expect a traveling show? These days I've been hot on the trail of the new inexpensive read/write optical storage tech coming out my part of the continent (TX), along with the new wearable computer tech, coming outta your part of the continent (PA). This is why we (at my firm Sudona) wrote Menstat and got involved with Suggestion Software, i.e. to be able to co-opt the emerging wearable/portable VR meme with intelligent/adaptive biosignal agents. Private Eye is so k00L! Gonna hafta buy some new wearable hardware, really soon. On that note, yours truly has been trying to scrape up enough $$ to both keep paying rent and satisfy my domineditrix with more cyberactive journalism. So, some of us mutants here in Austin have put together a new biz for mail-order/net-order of products from the Fringe. Yeh, cyberpunk wares you can't buy @ MacConnection, buy/sell/lease of used PowerGloves, brain-machines, etc. Innerested? Then email: "fringeware@wixer.cactus.org" And everybody PLEASE send me email about your latest VR street tech breakthrus and musings, so I can hype 'em up in the mass media: "pacoid@well.sf.ca.us" Oh, BTW... Scored deep contax into the Ono-Sendai cabal. We're gonna nail that story, ma copine, sooner or later. I swear they're real, despite the glossy ads. Alors, let's go gang-schmooz in SF, d'accord? BCNU @ 4D coord: Thanxgiving 92, Jer-Z. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c)1992, Paco Xander Nathan. All rights reserved. First appeared in _Pix-Elation_, issue #4: VRASP PO Box 4139 Highland Park, NJ 08904-4139 908 463 VRVR kaugust@caip.rutgers.edu (Karin August)