polystyle

Well-known member
Virtual real estate ...

As we see now, virtual real estate is def going to be a thing.


At first blush, i thought it was as silly as Grimes and her big NFT caper ...
But in fact, for anyone who has read Snow Crash , VRE has been a long time coming.

Certainly - i will take bets - the P Thiel's ( and their er, type ' ) , Elon and G ( and their type, surely role models for Silicon V types) will jump right in on it and debase it to some extreme.

A home on Mars ? why not ?
Under the sea ? ok
Just as in that animation movie - WALL - E , some types are going to be living out of their big potty chairs, never getting up as the couch goes with them.

It would be entrained into our platform X btw.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
I mean virtual real estate has already been a thing to different generations. I don't know if people here know what Habbo Hotel is but I have young cousins that were obsessed with that one. Seems the same with Minecraft too, now Roblox is the big one and worth ££

What the likes of these foundation apps are doing with these NFTs (and to a lesser extent I guess Elon Musk w/ this talk of chips in your brain and shit), is to try and normalise or introduce internet/incel (you are not doing this if you are slinging dick as Joey Diaz would opine) uptake of the conceptual product and to monetise the instinct that has worked successfully for the kids

So- I agree, I think is what the NFT market really is- though I do see people who are getting suckered into it thinking it's an artistic utopia- it is an attempt to try and generate the art market for usage in VR apartments full of shite endlessly rolling videos etc. It will work for a very specific sub-section but does it really become mainstream? Most people are happy with a print in the kitchen. Lot of money in it short term if you look at foundation auctions etc.

The thing is with VR is the credible real-life market there for it yet ? I dunno.

I think things like tiktok & insta before it- maybe even vine though was a lot more abstract- nod more towards a real future where you're creating an internet portal that allows people to share in your life (see onlyfans as most crude modern fiscal example), not creating your life within the portal.

"the old internet as psyche" is probably right in regards to where this part of it is going as it is really older men trying to invent an internet full of niche crypto concepts and that
 

wektor

Well-known member
Getting beyond topic, anyway ...
Today Ethereum's hd Lubin announces Palm ...

directing revenue towards co2 reduction? guess no one thought of a more simple solution to this
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps

Hirst launches the Palm platform with a drop of 10,000 works on paper linked to NFTs that “explore the boundaries of art and currency”​

I think Damien Hirst has been exploring the boundaries between art and currency for decades, the fucking chancer.
 

gremino

Moster Sirphine

Obviously this is a nostalgia thing, but you get some old internet from it. With websites like this, you can go deeper into the creators world, compared to quick social media posts. Or even if the SoMe posts are longform, they are still tied to a certain format. Social media's interactivity is great, but I have started to miss old internet sites which were creator's own worlds. You can still do them ofcourse, but how many will do in SoMe age?
 

gremino

Moster Sirphine
I hope smaller artists make good money from NFTs, but there's some downsides when you consider the original spirit of internet. The whole point of digital/internet is that files can be duplicated/streamed effortlessly, and everyone has inclusive access to them. Some may criticize that it takes away e.g. music's value, but I think that's just internet's inclusivity, whereas NFTs are bringing material world exclusivity to internet. But then again, this might be just tendency for humans to have exclusivity/ownership, as isn't digital's/internet's devaluation of things been criticized quite a long time now?

I don't want to be negative about NFTs though, as I really hope that not just big artists, but also the smaller ones will make money from it.
 

woops

is not like other people
what's weird about NFTs is the flickering value, the investment in a moment
 

gremino

Moster Sirphine
i love the fanzine mentality, indie culture can immerse you deeply in another world, all you want is to be part of it
That cyberzine is great. It has a human feel in it. Meaning that you can really feel that it is personal work of a human.
 

woops

is not like other people
That cyberzine is great. It has a human feel in it. Meaning that you can really feel that it is personal work of a human.
even if it's stuff you already knew, you feel the immediacy of it. by contrast, if it's stuff you know nothing about, you want badly to engage with it
 

version

Well-known member
Interesting thread here,
One of the more noticeable features of internet history is how the metaphorics of the online world have changed from the spatial realm to the temporal.

Early internet browsers used nostalgic, maritime visual thematics to represent web navigation as a kind of journey. Think of Netscape Navigator, with its ship's wheel set against a backdrop of stars and the upstart Internet Explorer with its own copycat metaphorics.

Website hosting in the late 1990s mimicked this sense that the digital realm was something akin to the physical world; a kind of spatial territory that the newcomer could acquire or settle in. Think of Homestead, with its suggestion that the web was a kind of endless frontier of new land, perpetually parcellable for new ventures, or Geocities, with its unabashed gestures towards the new urbanism and the smart city.

This spatial metaphorics obviously relied on an older pop-cultural understanding of digital materiality, one accessible via films like Tron or Lawnmower Man. Here, cyberspace was a physical dimension that could be entered and visualised, just like the physical world.

As the old web has faded away and the new platforms have risen instead, these spatial metaphors have come to seem gauche. What we see instead are metaphors of direct transfer of voice or presence (Twitter) or those of "real time" (the dromology of the instant): Instagram; TikTok.

This disappearance of online space seems to signal the end of the possibility of the online realm as a transcendent space. As Paul Virilio suggests, the journey is abolished in favour of endless forms of instantaneous arrival.

The idea of crossing a threshold or entering a genuinely new space is meaningless when all spaces are generated in real time by the dominant simulacra.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah but it's coming. It's gonna swallow the net I think. I think it's the next thing. The headset are not quite there yet, but they're not far off now
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
^ that's a great thread. also i hope you're right catalog.

(wrote this ages ago but didn’t post for some reason)

it’s funny how in a sense the early imagining of the internet as an immersive world you step into came true--but without the positive intellectual and spiritual connotations the vision originally carried. snow crash is an interesting case study because in a way its vision of the internet, the metaverse, has come completely true via multiplayer video games. but one of my favorite moments in the book is the quiet scene where hiro is diligently researching obscure information while inside the metaverse, with the help of an npc butler and a sort of in-game 3d google earth. i think that captures what didn't make the jump into the new millennium. this idea of the internet as a refuge for learning and exploration has been largely separated from its more fantastical/escapist side in a way that initially wasn’t imagined.

so while you might get the occasional project like this, which does bridge the gap:

virtual worlds are mostly designed by people like this:


in the new internet you have to chose between the informative yet dry and utilitarian text of wikipedia and the beautiful yet infantile game worlds--but what if you didn't? what if the best aspects of both were combined into one experience?
 
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catalog

Well-known member
i've been pissing about a bit in VR and it's true, it all looks bright and cartoon like right now. either that or "photo realistic" ie 360 photos.

was speaking to a friends who has designed a VR experience and he said it's cos the computing power, the drawing, the live rendering, it's still really hard. so you have the odd standout like alyx: second life, but everything else has to infantilise or simplify.

some other things that are maybe a bit interesting about VR:

1. it's already colonised / corporatised. this oculus quest 2 headset i've got at the moment is, i think, market leader and the brand, oculus, is actually owned by facebook. get that. you literally cannot do anything with it unless you join facebook. which is crazy to me. i deleted my fb account years ago and had to rejoin, just to use this fucker. how mad is that?

2. in order to get started in any VR experience with this type of headset, you need to create what's called a "guardian boundary" which is like a 2m x 2m space, or as close to that as you can get. you put one of the controllers on the ground, so it knows where the ground is, then you point one of the others and literally draw a circle round you, which is the clear floor, no obstacles.

and the idea is that this is your physical limit for your "6DoF" ie "six degrees of freedom" - so you can walk around this area, look up and down, turn around. and if you get near the "wall" of it, you breach back into actual reality, like a sort of weird watery glossy version of it, but it's like a safety feature, so you don't fall over and stuff. but it's weird, that moment of the breach, when i first put the headset on, i kept playing with that breach, cos the transformation between the different realities can be quite interesting.

3. i've been messing with this app called "multibrush" which is like any drawing app, similar look to ipad, but you can draw in 3D. like do a drawing, then magnify up and out, walk around it, draw on the other side. so more like sculpture. and you can make rooms and have other people in there with you, draw on each other's stuff.

4. you can take photos and videos but they look shit - all of a sudden, screenshotting is pointless and useless. the immersive experience requires the headset and full attention.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i went to this lecture/workshop run by this woman myra and she was saying how she thinks in a few years, maybe like our lifetime i guess, the tech will be good enough that you can swipe your hand in fornt of your face to make a new reality. cos like it always does, the tech is getting smaller / cheaper, and soon there'll be that moment when people will be buying them like phones, so the economies of scale will take over.

also, another thing she said was that it changes the role of the artist a bit. it's not like the artist now makes something and you watch it. it's more like the artist creates a space, or defines a set of parameters and the user is more like a participant and co-creates the art.

this is ehat those games like red dead redemption and vice city are like right? it's that, but you are more immersed in it. it's definitely gonna be like smartphones were, i'm sure of it now.
 

wektor

Well-known member
also, another thing she said was that it changes the role of the artist a bit. it's not like the artist now makes something and you watch it. it's more like the artist creates a space, or defines a set of parameters and the user is more like a participant and co-creates the art.

this is ehat those games like red dead redemption and vice city are like right? it's that, but you are more immersed in it. it's definitely gonna be like smartphones were, i'm sure of it now.
I think in that matter ER can become more relevant than completely Virtual Reality, perhaps with more and more virtual elements/extensions coming in.
No cyberpunk just getting on the tube and putting the snapchat dog facefilter on everyone's face. Erasing all the people around you and replacing them with chunky representations of their hitboxes.
More skins for your apartment/personal space than you can imagine.

Clothes seen as unnecessary since you can generate another outfit, displaying a thousand different ones on a night out, bah, even having one constantly morph and warp.
I imagine it will be like living at the bottom of the ocean, seaweed and corals seemingly changing shape under the pressure of masses of water above it.
Everything still a function of the real, first one to one mappings, later on please calculate my mood and accordingly draw manga-like reactions them on my face.
 
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