Technology

Čapek’s Scifi vision reflects the politics of his turbulent time and we're experiencing the fallout of those violent upheavals to this day.

The Neural Link - an Absurdist Reality - Text from the August 2020 PR event for Elon Musk's BCI venture, Neuralink

We’re marking the Robot centennial, 100 years of revolution and evolution, aspiration and agony, a century of mutual inspiration between industry and culture, art and policy, science and science fiction. At the heart of the Utopia “Master and Slaves” edition is the age-old naïve and un-answerable question – What is a Robot?

Video art (2018) by Shirley Shor, sound by Dror Rada, part of Shor’s solo exhibit, CryptoMania.

“Choice Architecture” and the gig Economy gamified are not easy ideas to portray in a movie, let alone in one which manages to effectively criticize this new form of labor “Apploitation”. It requires not a heavy-handed dystopia but rather a light yet disturbing touch, a nuanced narrative and attention to detail that manages to explain why people are attracted to these jobs and apps yet how they ultimately come to be dominated by them. A difficult mission that Noah Hutton’s Lapsis manages to pull off. A creepy yet all-to-real sci-fi parable.