SEASONS GREETINGS from Cybersalon.org Team
Wishing You all a peaceful Holiday season and a joyful 2024, full of active campaigns and techno-political encounters! Cybersalon Think Tank on Digital Futures will continue bringing you the best of European and US events coverage, through our flagship projects and campaign activities of our members.
We also look forward to welcoming you back to our Newspeak House events. Stay tuned for more!
Here a short round up of our projects in 2023
We have a new home in VR!
January – after a few months of hard building, finally our new virtual venue, Café Cyberia in VR has been launched. Despite technical glitches, we were lucky to work with PCM Creative on this 3D new world and delivered the new VR venue on time for Arts Birthday Global.
Our team Musicians live-streamed into a Watch Party in Cyberia. Irina Shtreis (ambient folk), John Horsley , Simon Sarginson and Dan Stapleton delivered great live coding to music sets. Audio in Altspace worked well to produce a beautiful, haunting and poetic music event. VR events are the future, and we invested into building a new VR Cyberia Café in Spatial.Io that allows guests with no VR Headsets to join via Desktop or Mobile. We remain committed to full immersive VR event but those need to be inclusive, which Spatial.io accommodates.
22 Ideas about The Future has a new AudioBook!
Feb and March were focused on our Cybersalon Press projects, with the team working hard to produce an AudioBook version for our speculative fiction anthology “22 Ideas About The Future”. The voice was provided by the multi-talented Wendy Grossman and produced by IveTechMedia with Ben Greenway audio engineering skills ensuring smooth outcome.
Get it here – the best book to listen to on your run or commute!
Cashless Society – House of Commons event on Digital Pound
In May 2023 we were invited to HoC to host an event on the future of UK post-cash.
Eva Pascoe chaired a heated debate with Iza Kaminska (Politico), Brett Scott (author of Cash, Cards & Crypto), Simon Youel (Positive Money) and John McDonnell MP (Labour).
The debate revealed deep fears of cashless society and although Central Bank Digital Currency is promising as collective funding tool (think National Savings bank), the current level of education around Pros and Cons is low and needs to be rapidly improved.
EU has made significant inroads into Digital Euro, with the assumption that Digital Pound will have to follow shortly. Our expert on digital banking Wessel van Rensburg (Santander Digital) helped us to formulate our, resulting in a subscription to UK government Consultation on CBDC.
Happy 30th Birthday to Mosaic Broswer
As part of our Internet History Program, we organised a big celebration of 30 Years of Mosaic Browser, the first Internet browser launched in 1993. Bill Thompson (BBC) Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex Uni), digital artist Halidonto and Eva Pascoe revealed what many have forgotten, that Open Source Internet was not a given in the early days. There were many fights to keep open source and stop the progress of Walled Gardens like AOL or Minitel! The event was hosted at Newspeak House, with our new members, Roberta Oram, Karin Tohtova, Camilla de Luca and many others helping to make it a fabulous celebration. We even had a birthday cake for Mosaic! Viva Open Source!
Gaming for change – Civil Power game with Sorbonne students v Parisian cops 68’ Played at Gamers Union (Pelican House)
In September, catching one of the last warm evenings we invited Brian Train, the designer of Civil Power game playing a scenario of police CRS v Sorbonne students in May 68’. We learned that ‘presence of TV Crews decreases level of violence’ and got many useful tips how to avoid being kettled and manage large scale urban protests. Sophia and me were on the Police team and represented Riot Squad, with the goals to attack and disperse the students. Tools were Molotov cocktails, and were used by agitators from March 22 movement, Situationists and working class youth, the blousons Noir. After a long 2 hour battle, “the students were left in command of the streets while the cops occupied the buildings, looking down at the students and the carnival below with disdain” (detailed review by Richard Perry on Class Wargames, this game was organised dr Richard Barbrook from Cybersalon.org)
Connect – join exhibition of paintings and digital artists in Cyberia VR and RSA Strand (UK)
In November we lifted our VR events research project to the next level, piloting a large scale event with 23 artists from UK and US mounting a join Hybrid Exhibition ‘Connect”
Zoe Camper ( US-based, ex Cyberia Café member, Fellow of Royal Society of Arts and Augumented Society US) co-produced and curated the Exhibition with PCM Creative on 3d builds and Cybersalon co-sponsoring the event. We built extended VR Cyberia Café, with extra beautiful gallery spaces with artists of diverse background showing and sharing their work in VR and in physical gallery in RSA Adams House. The hybrid launch was hosted by “The Stairs” gallery, with US, Columbia and UK artists attending in person and online. Exhibition continues till end Jan in RSA House (Strand). Zoe was particularly excited showing work by Ivan Pope, artists who pioneered early Internet and worked with us in the real Cyberia Café building on 39 Whitfield Street.
Many lessons learned, not least that in VR there is no limit to how much space can be taken so show curators have to be super disciplined to keep the selected work focused!
Next Gen Digital Entrepreneurs and Activists
Cybersalon outreach projects spread well beyond our East London base this year. We supported a number of hackathons and challenges, the biggest was at RSA in November. Cybersalon Innovation/Entrepreneur Education fund was tapped for sponsored Students hackathon on Product Design (UAL, SOAS, with Ash Farron in the lead) – in collaboration with Product100 (backed by Porsche Platform for collaborative design) and students from creative/digital/games and humanities degrees. Winning team has designed a new Token for improving trading assets in a not-for-profit social platform used for innovation competitions.
We are very excited about 2024, with a new, bigger and better book from Cybersalon Press to be launched in March. We will also be back with 2024 events program in January!
For now we are signing off and getting some rest after a very busy, productive year!
In the period from Sept to end Nov 2023 we also supported “Web3” Accelerator in East London, taking on 2 start us, one in Edu Tech and one in making Car Insurance cheaper for young drivers. Demo Day provided us with a lot of excitement, showing that web3 /blockchain/smart contracts can be used to make services cheaper and less stressful – while maintaining privacy.
We are very excited about 2024, with a new, bigger and better book from Cybersalon Press to be launched in March. We will also be back with 2024 events program in January!
For now we are signing off and getting some rest after a very busy, productive year!
