"It’s the post-electrical age!", part 3

Here are three videos from the DECONISM talk that I mentioned in this entry from a couple of weeks ago.

The original plan was to have Derrick de Kerckhove moderate as engineer/cyborg Steve Mann, VR artist Maurice Benayoun and philosopher Pierre Levy sat in a hot tub while discussing “fictitious truth, virtual fiction, realiction, and conjured reality” as the audience sat in a room made up to look like Plato’s Cave through the use of projections. Joi Ito was going to be present via telepresence through WiFi, Boris’ laptop and an Apple iSight.

It would’ve been pretty “cyber”, if we all hadn’t been plunged into darkness earlier that afternoon.

Troopers that they were, the gentlemen pressed on with their talk. Steve seems to have a bat-utility belt full of power cells with enough juice to power incandecsent lamps, and cyborg and artistes still sat in a tub; it just wasn’t very hot nor did it have jets.

I took some videos with my Coolpix while it was still light out. Luckily, the gallery room in which the talk took place had a large skylight, which provided enough ambient light for me to capture what the room looked like.

A view of the room, including a close-up of the hot tub. (494K QuickTime) “Arr! Here be cyborgs!”

Filling the tub, requests to conserve water be damned! (164K QuickTime) Forgive the sideways shot — I was thinking like a still camera guy (are there any cheap utilities for rotating video 90 degrees?). “We must preserve our precious bodily fluids.”

The cyborgs got me! (117K QuickTime) “He’p me, he’p me, he’p me p’ease, ah been hyp-mo-tized!”