Set in the year 2330, no one knows why but it is prohibited to leave the house with their bare face. People are now required to put on a mask called the Identity passport or IP for short. With the IP, everything that you need to know about a person can be put on display through your IP. Life still goes on normally thou no one knows when exactly the IP was created or made. People just came along with it. Throughout the different ages, people go to the place called the Centre to maintain their IP.
The world is now determined by their IP standings. Since it is public, people know how each other fare and treat each other according to their ranks. A class “A” citizen is entitled to higher education, priority treatment and many other benefits whereas a class “F” citizen is only entitled to public housing. These rankings are determined from birth and are dependent on the parent’s status. Though it is possible to change classes, it is uncommon for people to pursue change as the life that people live are predetermined and everyone has a role in society. No one ever questions the system as the world now has no problems and people get by with their classes.
Genre: Adventure / Identity
Story: Tim, a class “B” citizen has nothing but issues with his IP. He hates how uncomfortable it is, but still put it on whenever his parents tell him to. He goes around the house bare-face but has never seen his parents real face before. He once took off his IP in public by accident and saw things that he had never seen before. The siren rang, and he never dare to take it off ever again. By a stroke of luck, he spots someone with a mysterious IP, one that he has never seen before. It was different from the rest, almost as though the person was not wearing it. Curious to find out what lies beyond the IP, Tim decides to follow that person in search for an answer.
toryworld (Inspired loosely by Fallout): 200 years after the nuclear war between China and USA, the dust has settled, but the Earth glows in an eerie tinge of green, perhaps from the radiation. Most of the population were wiped from extinction the moment the bombs were dropped. Those who survive either mutated into Mutants, an orcish being, with superhuman strength that feeds on human flesh or Ghouls, that lost their minds and succumb to the radiation. But however, there are still people, or vault dwellers, that were privileged upper-class citizens who had the power and money to get themselves into nuclear-proof bunkers known as vaults, built by Vault-Tec, a giant tech conglomerate in the US. Vault-Tec was commissioned by the United States of America to conduct various tests in their vaults, with cruel agendas ranging from nurturing a breed of superhuman soldiers from a community of test subjects to understanding how radiation affects living subjects.
Genre: Dystopian, Sci-Fi
Story: The story follows a pre-War veteran who was cryogenically frozen after the bomb dropped for 200 years. His wife, and baby son had gotten themselves a slot at Vault 101 in the small town of Sanctuary. However halfway through the cryogenic sleep, they were woken up briefly, only to witness his son stolen from him and his wife shot by a mysterious mercenary through the glass of the cyro chamber he was sleeping in, before going back to slumber as the mysterious stranger walks away with his son. The next time he wakes up, he finds himself in the vault 200 years later. With everyone dead and his child’s status unknown, he sets foot out into the wastelands in search of his missing child and a score to settle.
Method: Through a first-person role playing VR simulation.
In a utilitarian world in the Year 2374, this philosophy has been advocated for years on end. In this dystopian reality, criminal punishment is dealt with in a different way.
Instead of sentencing these criminals to life in prison, death sentence or even in inhumane penitentiaries, they are placed in a whole different ecosystem. Since technology would be incredibly advanced, criminals are rehabilitated here to before coming back to society as functioning members.
This device is inspired by snow globes. With technology, these people are shrunk and placed within each snow globe. Each contains an entirely different ecological community from the next.
The first – represented by floral and fauna is to bring inmates back to basics and to live primitively. This is where they are re-learn basic human interactions and fundamentals such as caring for the environment, and to deeply connect with nature. This is the first stage as they are extracted from the unavoidable fast paced world of technology and innovations. Here, there are no other man-made and technological distractions.
Once they have completed all the requirements in the first globe, they are transported to the second globe – where basic technology, more modernised sights and surroundings are introduced. At the same time, everything that they experience while in these environments are closely monitored by a group of authorities that act as their carers.
Finally, once they have adapted to life in the second globe and have picked up more advanced socialising and living habits, they would be transported to the third. This third globe represents what I see the future world to be. The third and final globe is a microcosm of the reality in Year 2374. Inmates here would adapt and learn to be fully functional, contributing and respectful citizens before they can be released from this 3 snow globe system.
The City of Mizu
Important Technology
Shrink Machine Technology
Advanced Ecological Technology
Advanced Monitoring Devices
Method
Visualised and narrated through a short film/video
Global warming has reached an entirely new level and the ozone layers have depleted beyond repair. Due to the multiple kinds of pollution due to human activity, the environment has changed and the sun’s UV rays now have adverse effects on creatures dwelling the Earth. The rays can harm the human skin within seconds and it turns plants into rabid, dangerous creatures. Hence, the only way to survive is to avoid the daylight and only come out at night.
Because the sun rays can be harmful even when one is not under direct sunlight, humanity has now decided to migrate underground – people live in underground bunkers/ vaults. Not just homes, but work, entertainment hubs, malls are now fully underground.
Effects of sun rays on human skin and plantsUnderground bunkerHow the inside of the bunkers look
Genre: Dystopian
Story: to be told in a commercial-style, for the people in the bunker. I drew up a storyboard for the commercial and attached a sample advertistment of the kind of aesthetics I had in mind for the commercial. Basically the advert is trying to sell a suit that allows humans to go into the outside world in broad daylight unharmed.
Storyboard for the commercial (sorry for the amateur-ish drawing)
CharacterDescriptions: – Angie: old family robot that was beginning to malfunction – Eager: an experimental, goofy-looking robot that was bought to replace Gavin’s old family robot, Angie. He eventually becomes Gavin’s best friend – Gavin: main protagonist of the story; helps Ann to uncover the truth behind the mysterious deaths – Samantha: Gavin’s sister; works alongside Gavin and Ann to solve the crime – Ann: police officer who was put in charge of the recent series of mysterious deaths – SLIK Robots: batch of newer, sleek robots that were rolled out to replace the old batch of family robots.
Relationship Maps:
ImportantTechnology: – AI system that runs the smart robots – Advanced sensory and biometric technologies – Surveillance cameras that were installed inside the SLIK robots
Antecedent Technology:
Smart robots designed to serve families already exist in today’s world, ranging from the Aeolus Robot which is able to move household objects and adapt to changing environments, to Ubtech Robotics’ Walker, which offers a complete “home butler” service. However, these robots can only provide assistance to humans at home.
Equipped with an advanced GPS system and recognition function, the SLIK robots in this storyworld are able to run errands for their owners outside of the house. With highly advanced sensory and biometric technologies, it can also recognise and differentiate between an unlimited number of people, places and items.
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cor-photos/34571264585 Sketches of Eager (experimental robot) and SLIK robots (more advanced robots)
2. Genre Sci-Fi/ Thriller
3. Story
In the late 22nd century, rising sea levels and natural disasters from global warming have wiped out many coastal cities and the world’s population was tremendously reduced. Due to a severe lack of manpower, robots were created to serve families and take over jobs. In Washington, a new batch of robots called SLIK was rolled out to replace the old batch.
One day, Gavin’s family robot, Angie, starts malfunctioning. Since Gavin’s family is unable to afford a SLIK robot, they decided to get one of the cheaper, experimental robots – Eager. Eager and Gavin quickly became best friends.
Weeks later, Eager and Gavin were watching the news together – there was a series of mysterious deaths in the state. People who opposed the governments started dying mysteriously without any signs of struggle, and the SLIK robots that belonged to the victims were destroyed as well.
Suddenly, Eager started glitching and a vision of his past reappeared, showing the employees from SLIK installing mysterious-looking devices into the SLIK robots. Gavin, Samantha and Ann worked together to uncover the truth behind these mysterious deaths and found out that those mysterious-looking devices were in fact surveillance cameras planted by the government in the SLIK robots, for purposes of “national security”. The government, which only wanted only their supporters to survive, installed the robots with a unique voice recognition function that will alert the government whenever the robots’ owners mention keywords like “hate the government”. Since the government had full control over the SLIK robots, they were able to make the robots self-destruct, while standing beside their owners, killing them as a result. In the end, Ann, Samantha, Gavin and Eager found the main control station that controlled all the robots in the state, and managed to turn off all the robots in the country, including Eager.
This storyworld is based on how we know our world, Earth, today. However, it can be seen as an alternate universe or timeline – it is not a futuristic plot but it does have slightly more advanced technology than what we are used to. It is not set “in the future” from 2018, nor in the past. It exists on its own. In this society, people are born into professions – much like how people in the past were named after their professions (occupational last names such as Mason or Carpenter). The families are also related to one another based on how closely linked their occupations are – for example, the nurse, surgeon and physicist families are “cousin” branches of the main doctoring/medical family. Societal norms are more or less the same. The reputation of these families are based on their competency and value – i.e. doctors have larger roles in saving lives etc as compared to a plumber. However, ‘lower level’ occupations are still able to do well based on their expertise. My main storyworld character is a girl from a family of baristas but wants to invent tools within her field but is met with adversity and judgment from others because it branches out to the capabilities of engineers and inventors. She makes the “latte art stylus” and uses it while working, but it causes problems (like burning her hand or ruining the cup of coffee) because the device acts up.
I have not fully thought of the story progression but I started thinking of this ‘storyworld’ based on the context of this module – the idea of rapid prototyping and creating wearable studios.
In a future world, technology has advanced so much that death has been defeated and people are able to live forever. Humans no longer have to be afraid of dying because when they “die” on Earth (planet 1), their memories and mind are transplanted to a new body on the next planet until they die there again and the cycle continues through the other planets (5 in total). In short, mankind could be recycled over and over again. Each planet they are born into possesses different cultures, languages, and genetics. The only thing that remains constant is their name (there are no same names, everyone has their own unique name). This revolutionary idea was created as a solution to the problem of world overpopulation in the year 3390. To maintain the population at the ideal amount, governments of the world collaborated to enforce the law that no one was allowed to bear children of their own. Instead, the recycled human mind would be implanted into basic, genetically formed baby bodies, and given to their host parents who would then be able to choose how they would want their child to look like using a genetic modifier. Only when the child reaches 18, is he/she given the chance to gain access to the memories from their past lives on other planets so as to help them understand the world they live in.
Characters
Calix (main character)
James and Margot (Calix’s parents)
Nari (Best friend/Love interest)
Method
Movie/ Short series
Story
Calix is born on Venus (Planet 3) and has grown up to be a handsome young man. It has come to the time where everyone his age on the planet has to make the decision whether they want access to all their past memories or not. This decision can only be made one time in their life on this planet, and if they choose to access it, there is no going back. For generations, no one has chosen to access their past memories for fear of going insane or being unable to handle all the different lifetimes. They have witnessed many who took the risk, only to enter a dazed state of identity crisis before going insane after a couple of days and committing suicide (the ultimate end for a human if they do not report to the resurrection building to harvest their mind and memories for the next life).
James, Margot and Calix have talked about this and decided that he will decline access to his past memories. Calix is certain Nari will decline as well and they can continue with their daily lives.
However, on the day of choosing, Nari accepts access to her past memories and true enough disappears in a few days. She leaves behind a note for Calix, saying that she is still alive, but hiding somewhere and has created a copy of her memories from her past lives, so that Calix will understand why she has disappeared.
Calix watches her memories and is shocked to find that it is empty. It seemed someone got to her message before him and deleted the file. Everything seem to be wrong and unravelling. Calix knew he had to find Nari’s memories and then find her. In order to do so, he would have to sneak in to the government and find her files, and perhaps his memories as well. To do so, Calix combines the genetic modifier with the visual record of all the humans on Venus to create a wearable device that allows him to disguise himself as whoever he wanted as well as their data on this planet. With this he was able to blend seamlessly into the government and start his discovery on his missing best friend…..
(Wasn’t sure if we had to post and where – IVLE or here, I posted on IVLE earlier but deleted that – hence a late post!)
Based on Drawing 1 of Week 4 Tools for Creative Practice: Silkscreen Printing,
STORY WORLD:
In the near future, where everything, and everyone is printed, people don specialised, hi-tech screen-printing gowns and conform to a printing constitution written by The Assembly of Silk-Screen printing (ASS): only a specific design of elites and premium technology can be printed. Every individual is marked with unique identification code screen-printed on with permanent ink. Beyond their abilities to communicate verbally, they can communicate across time and space by scribbling on their individual silkscreens with fingers.
The story world I’ve been thinking of is borne of the licentious mixing together of ideas from several texts — media theory, philosophy, literature, glitch — perhaps literalising or abstracting concepts, transmorgifying the inane and the disparate into a fibre-optic bouquet of trashy digital waste.
1. Fleshing out the story world:
Characters: The unknown narrator. And the archaeologist, an unfathomable figure who collects media artefacts of the past. The notion of the archaeologist contains rich associations for me:
“Foucault’s contribution to the archaeology of knowledge and culture was to emphasize it as a methodology for excavating conditions of existence. Archaeology here means digging into the background reasons why a certain object, statement, discourse or, for instance in our case, media apparatus or use habit is able to be born and be picked up and sustain itself in a cultural situation. Kittler builds on Foucault’s ideas and has demanded a more media technological understanding of such archaeological work: such conditions of existence not only are discursive, or institutional, but relate to media networks, as well as scientific discoveries. Kittler wanted to look at technical media in the way Foucault was reading archives of books and written documents. What if we start to read media technology in the same way that Foucault exposed cultural practices and discourses to an analysis of how they were born and made possible in certain settings?” Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 6.
Important technology/antecedent technology: The world exists in a time not too distant from the present but also steeped heavily in technologies of the past. Important technologies would be antecedent technologies — camera obscuras, magic lanterns, phantasmagorias, panoramas, daguerreotypes, thaumatropcs, anorthoscopes, phenakistoscopes, praxinoscopes, mutoscopes, stereoscopes, screens, cameras, projectors, cathode ray tube televisions, flat screen televisions, monitors, central processing units…
Map:
2. Genre:
Speculative utopic/dystopic cyborg erotica
3. Written story:
Membrana excavatory: The churning of topsoil, unsheathing of earth, I watch helplessly as you prise apart crevices to enter loam, consider the blinding intimacies of striae left gaping-exposed. Screens blackened and dead are lodged within mounds of dirt – obtuse, blocky forms constituting slurried soilscapes, dioramas of asphalt chunks and deflection coils. The cathode ray tubes here no longer hum or crackle: From black box to black box, it is the way of things – the yield of the historical, the amalgamate of frenetic versioning, of in-built obsolescence, of mythic technocultures laid to rest.
The archaeologist bears their head low, the ocularity of the present moment offers nothing to provide comfort or respite. Plastic spires that jut and heave, metallo-oxidized air resting thick within alveoli… Nomenclature is a slippery thing. The garden of digital vastness, the phantom of the analogue cinematic, graveyards for scanlined images that no longer glow. The electronics beg for you to notice the things they have meticulously hidden. [1] Who else will cradle bouquets of cathodes and anodes? Florets of phosphor vibrating, mycelial network of coagulated electromagnetic waves, only the intrepid archeologist pushes their sticky bodies through.
The archaeologist collects, and that afternoon, archival was the only means of mitigating this fever. [2] Nothing so saturated as the constituent cybernetic data bodies intermingling, cloud storage servers scattering across landscapes emptied of message.
[1] “Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet ( and wily) finger I designate this mask.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 42-43.
[2] “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “mal-de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive. Now the principle of the internal division of the Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself, it repeats the very thing it resists or which it makes its object.” Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian impression, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57.
A millennium ago, Archania was a land where races such as humans, dwarves, and elves, as well as mythical creatures, coincide peacfully. It was rich with greenery and all races lived in harmony. Then one faithful day, a meteor shower struck the land and wiped out 50% of the population due to unknown radiation that caused living conditions to change entirely. The landscape of Arcania changed due to the radiation causing tectonic plates to shift, wildlife to transform, and food and drinking water became scarce. The survivors of all races adapted to the new environment and was forced to fight over scarce resources to stay alive. This resulted in territorial battles and a series of wars for several centuries. They also inspected the meteorites and found advanced alien technology —dubbed Archanium— to which they utilized to build their empires and weapons. It is now YEAR 1089Z, where the races have built giant kingdoms and empires. While food and water is no longer a problem and war has not broken out in the past century, the kingdoms are keeping to themselves — the hatred built up from several centuries of bloodshed and war still linger and there is an unspoken law within each kingdom that prohibits them from interacting with other races. This is New Arcania.
Story: The city of Youtopia was running low on Archanium supplies, spent mostly on development of weaponry for the Royal Army. Archanium is also used to for farming/food production and more of it would ensure survival of the human race. Captain Mike Straw, King Rupert’s most trusted advisor, was entrusted a mission to go on an excursion for more Archanium mining spots at the Twinklelight Forest within the Human Territories. Twinklelight Forest is located along the perimeters of the Elven Territories and this was a highly dangerous mission. This is the story of a covert mission that was meant to take less than a fortnight that changed the fate of Captain Mike and the land of New Archania.
Method:
Probably will tell it through a movie or a game
Role of the device: To help create sounds for the movie/game
