Dear Liz, and All the Cunning Stunts crew,
Thanks for your interest in our recent project,
here you can find the video online:
password: ******
The project is named Highway referring to the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The plot of the novel takes place in a highway, which is an infinite road that crosses themetaverse[1] where users inhabit and develop activity around it. As in the novel, the action is developed around a highway, whose codes, like those of "the street" do not obey physical laws. The form and space are subject to the will of those who rise. I'm also interested in the idea of the road as the icon of a historical moment, as in the novel On the Road, where Kerouac uses the road as the myth of a generation that saw the highways as a way to dream of becoming an economic power. The project is projected onto a highway that has replaced the asphalt roads from the power of silicon. And portrays a generation that have the capacity, innate or acquired, to inhabit and interact in contexts and differential conditions. This generation wants to challenge the different meanings they have and disrupt the circular routes of communication networks. Nevertheless, I decided to change the project’s title, I wanted to keep the tag “Incoming video call…” as part of the video contents, as an allegory of the presentism[2] the idea of an eternal waiting, impasse and going nowhere in this Highway.
[1] The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix "meta" (meaning "beyond") and "universe" and is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe. The term was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Concepts similar to the Metaverse have appeared under a variety of names in the cyberpunk genre of fiction as far back as 1981 in the novella True Names. Stephenson stated in the afterword to Snow Crash that after finishing the novel he learned about Habitat, an early MMORPG which resembled the Metaverse.
[2] As an answer to future shock, the American media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – present shock. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and weʼre contending with a fundamentally new challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was kind and careing toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live always in a “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.
We hope you find it interesting,
love
M&N
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