Recently...
Thursday 6th August 2008, 10:51am Hong Kong time
Net-city-future / Guiding Light
With Future Cities in the back of my mind, I recently watched Kevin Kelly's talk on the next 5,000 days of the internet. The has only been around about 5,000 days; Kevin Kelly gives a rundown of some of the absolutely incredible things now available through the internet, for example satellite images of the whole earth down to an incredible level of detail, documentation of almost all inventions, the weather, anywhere in the world, anyone's phone number, all of scientific knowledge...
Kelly: In 5000 days all this stuff has come...and i know that, ten years ago, if I had told you this was all coming you would have said that that's impossible. Simply impossible, there's no economic model to make that possible. And if I told you that it was all coming for free you'd say you're dreaming, you're a Californian utopian, a wild-eyed optimist...and yet it's here.
Mark Pesce's recent talk "Hyperpolitics" also grabbed me (via Edge.org)
He speaks of how social networks and the internet at-large can empower individuals to do things. This is not a new trend, of course. Modern labour movements and a focus within societies on the lives of common people, rather than a tiny aristocracy, came about in large part because isolated rural people were rapidly migrating into the cities, multiplying their collective intellect and impact. Synergy.
Pesce: The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.P
The internet is the new city, a mass of social connections.
How to portray this in photographs?
I intend to take a series of photos showing people with computers, laptops, mobile phones, gadgets.
People in front of screens, in the dark. The screen is the only light source. Long exposures. This would produce an effect similar to the photo above (lit entirely with ambient light, at night).
The dim light from the screen is enough to cast an eerie light over the scene. The screen itself burns out to a blinding white, the light bleeding out into the scene.
The person stares into the screen, transfixed...