Future-U and TextTube Futures Studio founders gather in Southbank at Brisbane’s impressive forward-thinking Entrepreneur Haus

Not far from GOMA and Brisbane’s trendy Soutbank precinct is Daniel Ngo’s Entrepreneur Haus (EH), home to a growing number of budding entrepreneurs making their mark in and around the container design of the interior. 11 December saw a summit of sorts; the founders of each of Future-U www<<we load this for you, TextTube Futures Studio www<<you load this for us made presentations with a view to building alliances and expanding communities. For Jonathan Nalder of Future-U, EH is a new venue for his bi-monthly gatherings in which mind-mapping and other innovative techniques are used to get people thinking about future Brisbane. Delighted with the choice, Nalder sees this as the beginning of a "A forum and way for brisbanites to begin contributing their ideas of what a preferred Brisbane future looks like”
Supported by relationships and partnerships director Robert Scott, David Wright, founder and curator of TextTube Futures Studios TTFS  and its f3 event excited the audience with his vision to bring ‘Experiential Futures’ to an audience drawn from academia, entertainment and media. The mandate of TTFS is to equip individuals and entities to visualise, capture and render across diverse media its preferred futures by drawing on tools and techniques unique to the discipline of Future Studies.

The owner and founder of Entrepreneur Haus, Daniel Ngo has designed and built from ground up a co-working space which delivers an environment conducive to the creative thinking needed in today’s digital business world. Additions such as the photo booth are but one of the features he has thought of to differentiate this space from the many in central Brisbane.
The catered event lasted two hours with Q&A and saw an audience of 30 individuals from academia, design, education, photography. The momentum has gathered enough for discussion on a larger-scale structured event to be held early 2018.

Tribute to BladeRunner - f3 attends GoldenAge Cinema's rooftop experience!

Anyone reading this will know Bladerunner,   that neo-noir science fiction film influenced by Metropolis and others and one of Ridley Scott’s greatest.
That was 1982. 34 years later and it’s every bit as relevant.

Sydney's Bradbury Bldg

f3 Relationship and Partnerships Director Scott attended an impressive event in Sydney, Australia Feb 20., staged by the creative team at Sydney’s GoldenAge Cinema www.ourgoldenage.com.au
GoldenAge as the name suggests celebrates the timeless cinematic works of art we’ve all known and come to love. This initiative is bold and it is worth paying homage to. One of our genres during the upcoming Hong Kong event will be retro futures.

This cluster looks at how our predecessors perceived and portrayed the future, giving us valuable insight and perspective on our own problems in the present. It also explores how historical images of the future managed to influence or otherwise the future as it unfolded into the present.

Popular it was. All tickets were sold within 4.5 minutes via Eventbrite. Being held on the top two floors of a less-than-esthetically pleasing parking building approaching Chinatown in downtown Sydney meant approvals had to be secured for each and every use. Municipal administration is notoriously reticent with the result that the original planned date late 2015 had to be postponed.
Another challenge in the form of precipitation came close to threatening the event as it started. The numerous rain scenes in the epic nevertheless were re-invoked and we felt did not detract. Plastic ponchos were dispensed to fans and while nothing of the sort appeared in the movie, collectively it did lend to the event overall.
Surrounded by tall buildings, some with neon motifs emblazoned towards their tops with the screen against a similar backdrop lent to the eeriness, especially given that headphones were used by all producing a ‘silent’ cinema.
Fans were greeted at the base of the building by attractive women adorned with the facial ‘warpaint’ of Pris Stratton, the ‘basic pleasure model’ who was legendary in the movie, even if replicants of Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer were not in evidence.  More could have been made we felt in this regard.
Fans ascended the building via a fire escape and traversed the final two floors, coming face to face with a laser show, together with dry ice discharging from a number of sources. Albeit lonely, one installation was the work of Freya Jobbins, ‘Plastic Surgeon’ at www.freyajobbins.com

Topside revealed the neon which fans will recall from the movie. The giant billboard showing the geisha girl played by Alexis Rhee in a larger affair might have been well received, and in its place was the food servery displaying pastels, and set against a stark skyline.
Beyond this was a couple of installations bringing to mind Matrix more than BladeRunner, but atmospheric all the same.
The original movie used the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles as a key setting. Obviously a city of that size with a not insignificant Chinese population is a superior location but we must be reminded that the makers of Matrix chose Sydney on a number of occasions for that series and we see definite commonalities.

What of the (dreaded) Spinners in BladeRunner? The airborne police craft which maintained or sought to maintain law and order from above?  In a perfect world this would be a job for one or several drones. These were missing this time and we suspect not through lack of trying.

It is significant that it was Shaw Studios, Hong Kong which came to the financial rescue in the early days of production of BladeRunner. f3 maintains a rapport with this studio and it is fitting that our first international event should actually be in Hong Kong SAR, China. Somewhat distant from the city in a place called Telegraph Point is Hong Kong’s “unique creative digital community”, Cyberport. f3 will be bringing media into contact with futurists worldwide as we seek to provoke what the future is, can be and should be. Part of the Cyberport complex is known as the Arcade, a futuristic shopping mall with a large outdoor screen as one of its features. This will appear in the f3 programme, soon to appear on www.f3the-event.com

Talks in Transit - four sessions held on a RailCorp carriage connecting Object, billed as Australia's leading centre for contemporary design located in Bourke St. Surry Hills, Sydney, with the Powerhouse gallery, approximately one hour away near Liverpool, SW Sydney.
The convenor may be seen here: http://cusp-design.com

The first session, titled Zero Hero vs. The Futurologist, combined Zero-waste crusader Stephen Mushin with futurologist Stuart Candy for a lively inquiry into just whether mankind was in an evolution of revolution process.

The past - present - future continuum was mined for entry points appropriate to 'futurecasting'. Could it not be possible to repurpose the nation's many musuem as 'visionarium' where citizens could gather to ponder 'possible worlds'. The Canadian/US 'Festival of Possible Worlds' shortly to take place squanders perhaps this otherwise potent label where f3 is in the business of encouraging the erection of possible worlds for the future.

Need the setting for pondering these worlds necessarily be static ? Railways in Queensland are giving thought to how best to draw attention to linking assets key to the f3 event to be held in Brisbane September 2014 and we can learn from the Sydney foray.

Designing habitats is a theme dear to Object as it is to Stuard Candy, who has worked with ARUP.
CUSP, Designing into the Next Decade is a team of 'Twelve Australian individuals working on the cusp, exploring the potential of design in our lives'. Several of these have put forward their ideas at the recent TEDx, and one is to appear on the third 'Talks in Transit'.
Object has held 'Termite City' for children which has the young ponder the sophistication of a termite mound and how 'Human cities might be like termite cities one day and we need you to help us design them.'
Termite City is part termite mound, part ancient Roman maze. It’s a massively cool future city designed for kids, and it will be built by kids from thousands of milk crates over four days and decorated with shadow silhouette inhabitants. Think massive lego building, think milk crates on ropes and pulleys, think giant maze, think tiny shadow puppet people, think termites and tunnels, think Termite City.

f3 Potential Location - The Cube QUT

f3 Founder-Curator visited The Cube state of the art media complex at Queensland University of Technology's Gardens Point Campus to discuss the feasibility of an f3 event at this location. The screens here are two 7 m X 7 m interactive screens powered by four projectors. The Cube complex has numerous facilities which can be used for conferences, seminars, outdoor concerts and parties, making it an attractive venue for a future f3 event. —at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Haiku and Flash Fiction - Fragment Fiction

This is a short experimental futuristic animé film by the late Keisuke TAKAHASHI. Keisuke was a student of f3 Founder-Curator at the Future University Hakodate and had great promise as a storyteller and artist. We will never what kind of stories and film he might have made. His themes of alienation, connectedness, Man and God, squeezed into this microcosmic self-analysis of Keisuke’s inner world, exemplify the concerns of Japan’s youth in an increasingly complex world.

f3 Relationships and Partnerships Director Robert Scott and the 11 Eleven Project

The Relationships and Partnerships director based in Sydney, Australia attended a screening of the '11ElevenProject' one year after its inception on 11 November 2011.

The 11ElevenProject is a movement of thinkers and storytellers who have 'brought the world together, even if only for one day', amounting to a stocktake of where the world stood on a given moment. This 'state of the planet' is reminiscent of Life in a Day, a documentary which showed at the Sundance Film Festival by Hollywood director Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott in which thousands of YouTube videos capturing a single day around the world were submitted to YouTube and distilled to become a whole. It differs in that it rallies people worldwide on its anniversary for something of a reality check in what could be called a visual time capsule.

Five categories or media are available: sound, text, film, photography, music through which a snapshot is taken of the human condition.

In the pre-UGC (User Generated Content) era, there was Baraka, a mosaic of mankind engaging with his planet. Naqoygatsi depicted 'life as war' shortly after and more recently, French director Yann Arthus-Bertran gave us Home which showed us how the planet was getting on despite, or because of man.

UGC has produced a great Cambrian explosion of life as we rush to capture the moment. Most of us now have the freedom to say what we want to say, and to say it how we want to say it.

But 11Eleven succeeds in what comes next, prolonging the discourse. We are literally called to account once a year and asked to record that which must be celebrated in life. Scott came away smiling in the sense that the bedrock of society, the social fabric had not, it seemed, been ruptured. While all was not rosy, optimism was definitely a theme of the movie.

The project's creative director, Danielle Lauren speaks of 'advancement of global change and a positive future for all' and 'reclaiming our humanity – owning our mistakes and working towards ensuring a better future for all'. While not promising any given future above another, f3 through the visual medium of the moving picture promises to fix a gaze on a number of futures, to then encapsulate each and to subsequently plot a course in a given direction. Importantly, f3 will forge the link beyond, way beyond the film itself.

The objectives common to f3 and its Los Angeles partner F2 are:

1. Promotion of preferable global human and non-human futures.

2. The tendering of alternative models of being, doing and having.

3. Raising the consciousness of audiences vis-à-vis the central thematic of futures thinking and praxis.

4. Inspiring post-media behavior with futures-beneficial outcomes.

At the inaugural event taking place Northern Hemisphere Autumn of 2013, film will be married forever to transmedia as participants - no longer called the audience - forge and embrace new realities.

For reference we present two Youtube videos of the project which itself may be found at www.11elevenproject.com

Original premier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAsCObJNKSc&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

Creative Revolution metaphor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-sHh8GEjak&feature=relmfu

Retro Futures in Asia - f3 project at the Northern Museum of Visual Culture

The Northern Museum of Visual Culture

Saturday, November 10 2012 at the Museum

I met with executives (left, Yumi WADA – Administrative Director and book publisher; middle, Kenji TAKAMURA – Museum Director; and right, Nanae ARATAME – head of Promotions) from The Northern Museum of Visual Culture – 北の映像ミュージアム – Saturday November 10 to discuss possible collaborations between f3 futures film festival and their Museum. The Director, Kenji TAKAMURA is a cinema researcher and veritable walking encyclopedia when it comes to the global cinema industry. His interest in our f3 project has ignited a new ecology of possibilities for developing a Japanese f3 project – possibly starting in Sapporo. At this initial stage, our discussions suggest that an effective way to promote the project in Japan is for myself to give a presentation at the Museum about my experiences as a futurist and filmmaker in Hokkaido, in which I would introduce f3 as one project in our overall portfolio. The second stage would be to stage an actual micro-f3 – also at the Museum – with a select crowd of local and international guests. Just what this micro-f3 would entail is something that we need to design. My sense is to aim for a one-day event, screening 4-6 representative futures films over a broad spectrum of the 20 or so film categories we have conceived, a simple wine and cheese party, a modest panel discussion focusing on the nature and significance of the films shown, and an outline of the greater f3 futures film festival concept and its future directions.