Creative Machines - Issue #7

Until now, design fiction has been the province of disparate, interested parties: designers and researchers swapping ideas with underground hackers, political activists and science fiction writers. But as the Digital Dozen award for “Lithopy” shows, design fiction is moving beyond the niche of academia and highbrow design studios, into technologists’ laboratories and, perhaps, people’s homes.

For years, the film festival circuit has been an opportunity for immersive artists to experiment and explore the storytelling potential of emerging technology devices, haptic devices, bone conduction…

Can we use the pandemic to come up with broad solutions that fix more than just the virus?

You won’t be swimming in any ball pits at made-for-social pop ups this summer. You also probably won’t go to your favorite music festival, frequent your local amusement park, or attend that conference you’ve been looking forward to.

Andreessen Horowitz is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms investing in software, and lately it’s been investing in games.

Before the pandemic, immersive theatre was one of the fastest-growing arts sectors. Theatremakers from Les Enfants Terribles, Secret Cinema, Hartshorn-Hook and more tell Anna James about diversifying their work during lockdown and their ideas for staying safe when shows can reopen

Eschaton is an immersive theater show run over Zoom and Whatsapp, as veterans of productions like Sleep No More turn to virtual theater under shelter-in-place orders.

Graphika has uncovered a massive Russian troll operation, similar to the Internet Research Agency campaign that targeted the 2016 US elections.

In a bid to lessen the blow of COVID-19, the town of Tenino has started issuing its own wooden dollars that can only be spent at local businesses. Will it work?

When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.