Episode 42: Radical Simulation: Exploring the Gray Area Between the Omniverse & the Pluriverse

In 1936 publisher Henry Luce imagined a new form of media based on the rapidly advancing art and power of photography. His awe was captured in this mission statement for Life Magazine:

“To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed”

We are at a similar moment of transformation today with the tools of simulation, rendering, and the ability to create and play artificial worlds. The theme of today’s show is Radical Simulation: How will today’s massive compute and artificial world-building tools help our generation, “To see the world, To imagine its possibilities, To transform it, To connect with cultures and be amazed, To gaze into the future, and make smarter decisions as a society to get there….”

1 Tools for Simulation – We’ll be joined Anuj Aggarwal who leads Omniverse partnerships for Nvidia, the semiconductor company which more than any other builds the compute power and GPUs at the core of gaming system Hollywood production and artificial intelligence. He’ll share with us whats possible when Nvidia builds into hardware Pixar’s universal scene description language – how the most sophisticated artificial worlds we see in movies can now be rendered real-time in games, in art, or in systems that let us simulate the physics, economics and the environments of our cities and planet.

2 Radical Simulation – Then, onto the cultural perspective: we’ll hear from the team producing next week’s Gray Area Festival, “Radical Simulation”. It’ll be presenting artists using immersive worldbuilding to re-imagine adjacent possible presents through themes of embodiment, social justice, identity, decolonialism, and regenerative ecology. We’ll hear from curator Kelani Nichole and Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw on how the arts and culture can influence our simulated worlds. And why, in a world of digital twins and radical simulation, our online culture more than ever influences the real world, if that’s even a distinction any more.

3 The Culture of Mixed Media – Institute for the Future Research Fellow and media artist Amber Case, who has been exploring the cultural implications of mixed reality for years as a designer in the academic (MIT, Harvard) and corporate worlds (Esri.) She observes that we’ve been living in a simulation for years, via 2D social networks. So why, when we envision the future, is it so often the same—a kind of Jetsons vanilla world. How can we ask questions, use feedback loops, and draw on 5,000 years of history and culture to imagine the future with depth, and not the shallow aesthetic we are used to?