This paper discusses the emergent gameplay practice known as speedrunning, or the process of completing a game as quickly as possible without the use of cheats or cheat devices, and its relation to games as narrative spaces.

A text written for IOCOSE‘s exhibition “All of Your Base” held at Aksioma Project Space in Ljubljana, 1 December 2021–14 January 2022.

Published as a PostScriptUM PDF and print-on-demand publication.

► WHY I WANT TO FUCK ELON MUSK ► eBROCHURE (PDF)► PRINT ON DEMAND [coming soon]► LIST ON ISSUU

In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. “Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk” plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus created by human and non-human imagination builds a literary counterpart to IOCOSE’s latest works – the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021) – presented on the occasion of the “All of Your Base” exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space in Ljubljana.

Download PDF (eBROCHURE) View on Aksioma website

The Covid pandemic has already turned life as we know it upside down – and no doubt prompted some people to want to leave the planet. Now a leading scientist has warned that viruses may not only be found on Earth, but might occur – should life exist – elsewhere in the universe.

Sometime in April, the Ingenuity helicopter will take to the Martian air, making it, in NASA’s words, “the first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.” Or, to put it in more mundane terms, Mars will have become another airport.

Afew​ years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic.

On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with space warfighters and weapons, by the year 2020.

Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challenging in several ways.

Here comes private space travel — with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip!

Long before mastering the mechanics of spaceflight, men imagined sending other men into the cosmos.

It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences.

On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed an audience of 35,000 people at Rice University in Houston and put forth his vision for sending an American to the moon before the end of the decade.

The satellite company Planet is used to breaking records. In 2014, a rocket exploded with a payload of the company’s satellites inside—26, the biggest loss ever.

Singularities panel, Transmediale (5th Feb 2017)The video of our #Singularities panel at Transmediale is now online:Featuring the extraordinary talents of Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos speaking (and performing) on refiguring techno-colonialist and heteronormative pasts, presents, futures and identities.The introduction to the panel - written by Morehshin and myself - can be found here. Photos from the panel are here.Stick around for the discussion and Q&A

The Holocene is dead; welcome to the Anthropocene. Once a controversial stance, the notion that human activities have altered planetary geology adequately enough to warrant the demarcation of another epoch has more traction than the Mars Rover.

I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”.

The US wants to press ahead with asteroid mining, but rights to the riches buried in space are a grey area. How should we draw up rules for harvesting the heavens? “MAGNIFICENT desolation.

Leaving planet Earth isn’t easy. This year, NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program received a record 18,000-plus applications from highly qualified scientists bent on discovering space’s deep abyss. It will choose a handful, if that.

It astonishes me how much we seem to know about aliens. They build technology-driven civilisations and pilot spaceships across the galaxy. They create energy-harvesting structures around their stars. They beam interstellar greetings to us.

To colonize Mars, researchers are developing a new kind of concrete that doesn't require water and is more than twice as strong. Concrete has been critical to the colonization of our own planet.

The text below is a paper I wrote to correspond to my presentation at the first 100YSS Symposium in 2011. 0. Preamble1. The case against civilization2. The evils of civilization3. The future of civilization4. The future of morality5. The place of consciousness in axiology6.