Hello, gang (ehm).
Here is all of what I remember from our Sunday discussion. I am sure though that in spite of the long email, I must have forgotten a bunch of things.
Thanks to all for the fun
-- Flavia
This is a writeup of the WIRELESS IMAGINATION group.
Once again, it is a general scketch and there are just a few things that need to be there for the place to 'exist'. It is going to be a good platform only if people can get to add to it.
There is two main cultural references to this:
As part of the iconography and story generation, I would like to suggest a couple of more references:
**** 3. Mythologies, by Roland Barthes. ****
There it goes.
Our world is composed of a mid-world, an upper world and a lower world - on top of a turtle.
The mid-world is actually a huge theme park, with catacombs (down) and a 'cosmic map' (up). Catacombs are inhabited by ghosts and constellations are inhabited by angels. Angels are organized in 'gangs', according to the constellation that they belong to, and love to play jokes on people. Ghosts instead have Unions to help represent their rights in dealing with living people.
The theme park is called 'DreamLand' (maybe). The interesting thing about DreamLand is that inside there, somewhere, there is the real world of which DreamLand is a mockup. If you find it you will live forever (if you really want to ...). Shopping is forbidden in DreamLand. If you are caught shopping by a policeman you will go to jail. Only free exchange or donation (of creatures) is alowed.
Users can eventually join Angel gangs or Ghost Unions.
(digression: watching 'Brazil' and seeing 'The City of Lost Children' for those who haven't seen them becomes a must. I personally would like to re-visit 'Blade-Runner'. Dunno exactly why. Missing some techno stuff here I guess. There must be a solitary hero in here somewhere making justice of some unjust dream ...)
Nightmare Burgers are everywhere like StarBucks - people go there to drink, rest and dream-chat.
There are dream-poets that write beautiful (visual) dream-poems.
The worst illness that you can get in DreamLand is insomnia because that won't allow you to dream. There are doctors for that. You need to find them if you want to be able to continue playing ... If you can't find a doctor you can always consult the oracle (the one we talked about, half human-half pager).
If one is caught speaking about reality he/she goes to jail.
Time in DreamLand does not exist. Time is only in the hands of the grey people (because they have clocks like the white rabbit). Actually, whenever a Reality Bomb hits DreamLand it starts a local clock and then things start growing older and older and then die and fall into the catacombs. The ghost Unions need to make pressure on the living people so that they do not forget the dead. So, sometimes they organize demonstrations or happenings to honor this or this other ghost. So in DreamLand past and present and future are all mixed together
(can you help me think about the consequences of that ?).
Users who cannot make their own dream (visually on the web) can write to a dream factory who will create the dream that they ask for. They can keep the dream for personal use and they can also find a co-dreamer to start dreaming together. This should work as a chain so that it gets more and more people involved.
Note: it is important to use fax and cell phones or even regular phones (with prerecorded messages) to make people even more involved.
And there are of course dream thieves (users can choose to be one).
Metaphor:
The Story:
The only way for DreamLand to survive is to diffuse as much as possible the spirit and the inspiration to dreams. To do so the inhabitants of DreamLand (that's the users if you were still wondering) need to make clones of the mother-of-all-dreams - Alice - and diffuse her around (like the Santa Clause letter ...). Against her is the white rabbit with his clock. He is at the head of those grey creatures who want to take over. The White Rabbit is actually running a black market of reality somewhere in DreamLand and you have to find it in case you really need to remember how things were before you got involved in DreamLand.
There is a perfectly simmetric mirror to this world called RealityLand where people can only talk about reality and where dreaming is forbidden. (a different notion of a mirror site ... an inverse mirror site!). People can use only text to communicate. Their world is full of administrative buildings and there are clocks everywhere. This world is full of replicated rabbits and here Alice runs a black market of dreams. If you are in this world you may choose to be part of the subversive group that tries and restore the legitimacy of dreams by putting fantasy bombs. People could trade applets that correspond to these bombs, as thought there was a secret arm trade going around the two worlds.
There are holes both in DreamLand and RealityLand that all of a sudden can bring you from one place to the other. In between the two worlds you could get caught into this Limbo which is made by those dreams who had never had the chance to become true. The forgotten dreams. The dreams of those who gave up. The dreams of thise who passed away. Some people who stop by this intermediate world can pick them up and make them live again in DreamLand...
The Rules:
The Weather:
Characters:
Situations:
** The Dream News Broadcast will give news about the weather and how that has affected some users' web pages. Also some natural webtectonic phenomena happen in DreamLand - like web quakes and eruptions from volcanos. In DreamLand there are flat-words Volcanos and in RealityLand there are dream - volcanos. These flat-words/dreams end up in some neighboring users web pages...
** someone also mentioned dream adultery: that is when two people are having a dream relationship and then one decides to dream with someone else ...
Pagers Life:
Entertainment:
LIVE SITES:
People in the live site should be able to receive a dream-news report (on the hour). Some users could choose to be dreams-correspondents and contribute to the dream-news (DNN ?).
All Live Sites are connected: each of them has a Virtual Window. Windows can be windows directly into other spaces through cameras OR they can be windows into other people's dreams. As much as people in reality have windows that they look through when they wake up or while they work - we're going to ask them to put on the web the image of the dream that they see from their inner room.
At the Live Sites you can secretly participate in dream/reality blackmarkets if you really are into those things ...
We can make more than one live sites and the sites could be different. -- right ?
Random stuff:
This event is brought to you by ... The Dreams of the Future Consortium.
Please feel free to add/change to this before we post it on the web.
1. Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, of course.
2. Michael Ende's 'Momo'
4. Image, music, text, by Roland Barthes
5. The Eiffel Tower, and other mythologies, by Roland Barthes.
6. Empire of signs, by Roland Barthes.
**** 7. Man and his symbols, by Carl Gustav Jung ****
8. Memories, dreams, reflections, by Carl Gustav Jung
9. Exercises in style, by Raymond Queneau
10. The skin of dreams, by Raymond Queneau
11. t zero, by Italo Calvino
12. The Infinate Story, by Michael Ende
People can get them and send them to other people. That is the start for being able to dream together.
There is one in the theme park. How do you imagine life in prison in DreamLand ?
And near and far are measured only by the similarity of dreams.
To enter the game/story you have to find a co-dreamer.
To find a co-dreamer people can go to this place in the theme park where there are GIGANTIC MACHINES. These machines are: a huge crossbow, a windmill that rotates faster and faster until it launches a dream, a huge cannon (gun) that uses whipped cream as a starter and a fat woman as a carrier, a bow, a used rocket launcher + other machines that you can help me think of. They put the dream in there and then the dream will be launched into somebody's web page.
the metaphor here is that of an inverse machine-life (I mean those machines that keep seriously injured people alive in hospitals). In this game/story people are alive only when they are connected to the dream-machine (our web site) and so get to live in DreamLand.
DreamLand is facing the risk of destruction by an organization of grey creatures who want to introduce reality as part of this world. Grey people are inhabitants of a parallel world called RealityLand. This world is full of flat text, there are NO or few pictures and here pagers have no soul (whatever that means ...)
More on RealityLand further in this description.
Users can eventually choose to join the grey creatures and help them trying to take over DreamLand. Grey creatures have a secret chat room somewhere in the DreamLand theme park. Here they plan their terrorist attacks. These attacks often take the form of REALITY BOMBS (see eralier in this description).
Fantasy bombs can hit users' web pages and change some dream icons or change the onomatopeic text with synonyms (!) or change the expressions of the expressive text.
Poeple who live in DreamLand have to observe the following rules:
- one can only speak through images
- pictures come out of the mouth
- only expressive text and onomatopeic speech
There is an intermediate layer between the cosmic world up and the mid-world of DreamLand. That's the weather ! Weather is generated out of the collective behavior of users and it can make rain happen on your web page. A hurricane could come in and scramble web pages or the sun can change the background of people's pages. Weather has also an impact on live sites (see the live sites section of this description).
** There is a solitary hero - a Blade Runner type of - who has the mission of saving as much of these lost dreams as possible and bring them back to DreamLand to make them live. Some users might want to help him. The funny thing though is that as he cares about being a solitary hero they have to help him without letting him know. If he gets to know he gets upset and they have to choose another role.
** The oracle: it's half pager and half person (Pascal !?). Users can consult the oracle on issues like dreams interpretation, insomnia, dreams of the future and also on who are they going to dream with next time (...)
The oracle sends responses only through pagers. So people who do not have pagers will have to find people whp have them in order to be able to read the response.
** Police ! measures how much you've thought about reality with a reality meter. They can also use radar guns to spot if you've been nostalgic about reality. If you are caught thinking too much or talking about reality then police will put you in Jail.
** There is a used email salesman and a used dreams salesman
** There are the flimpsy guys
** and the Alice multiples of course
- more Jeanne ?
** People can (and have to) dream together, but they can also visit each other in their dreams. Can you imagine dream traveling ? People on one site who like dreams of people on another site can try to contact them and dream-visit them.
If they like each other they can decide to dream all together.
If they want to continue doing that they can decide to move
all together in the same neighborhood in DreamLand and so they will start to look for apartments. Dream Realters advertise through personalized dream-News Services and through the DNN News Broadcast.
The news will tell about these phenomena happening too.
They will report about reality/fantasy bombs.
It would be great if we could synthetise news through an audio channel and have people listen to it. It would be much more... well ... realistic (but please don't tell people in DreamLand that we've said that)
There is also going to be a weather forecast.
News can broadcast important events to people with pagers (so that they connect to the web again). People with pagers often receive Reuters news on them. So that would work the same.
- Barbara: what else did I forget ?
Some users can decide to run away with someone's dreams too (sigh !)
** creature trading: more on that - Chloe ?
** good and bad dreams: some dreams turn out to be transportation dreams: dreams of flying will bring you in the cosmic world and nightmares bring you in the catacombes.
** when people register for this game they put it some info: like if they have phone/fax pagers. When they start participating their pagers will come to dream-life by beep-beeping. Users will receive "Waaah!" messages.
Maybe somebody in the group wants to add here (Chloe ?)
** pagers as autonomous creatures. They could receive an update every X time (like we receive Reuters on them regularly) to update their behavior file. This means that when a user with a pager sends a message the latter is filtered through that behavior file.
** also pagers do not necessarily need to receive text messages. They could receive something like an ascii secret code that brings up a web page (oracle response ?)
In order to have fun in DreamLand you can go to this 'cinema' site. It contains short sentences from people's web pages. These sentences are phrases that people write because we ask them to fill in a slot: like: your favorite animal, the color of the sky in your dreams ... Then we read these and compose dynamic poetry by reading from many people's pages and make a continuously changing haiku with expressive text.
Anyone interested in building this java applet with me ?
input: there should be some sort of a dream machine also in the live sites. If you put one of the given objects in there all of a sudden this object is going to appear in all dreams generated by the dream factory. Also it slowly starts to appear in some of the dreams that people put up on their web sites.
output: In the live sites *real* weather phenomena could happen that reflect collective activity of what is going on on the web. If many people having bad dreams generate a hurricane we should simulate one happening on the live site. Maybe can generate even snow and storms with lighting on the live sites.
twins looking for twins: 2->4->8->16 ...
paper airplane birds
map of the world
crossed dreaming
POVs: veggie world, animal world, thing world
dream orgy