History of Virtual Futures

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Our interest began in 1994 or perhaps even earlier. There was an extraordinary collection of people in philosophy and literature departments at that time at Warwick. We're also now profoundly obsolete in the technological terrain that we've created. But we're all loosely associated around what we saw as the most…

• 00:00:55

  And the fact that we've generated now, or technology generates a speediness that accelerates the body to attain planetary escape velocity. All of a sudden the body finds itself in an immense extraterrestrial space. The body cannot cope. Its softness, its wetness, its complexity is not really suited to environments…

• 00:01:56

  And it was left to us, first of all, we're very young, time to point out. There's a built-in life cycle here and it's a human life cycle and all the people who are complaining would be dead within 30 years, 40 years. And already now, I'm not even using a keyboard anymore. I'm not typing, I'm not texting when I…

• 00:02:42

  Certainly, if you apply Moore's Law and translate it on a, let's say, a cultural basis, if you interpret it, whether you say metaphorically or not, if you interpret it as a law that has more than application milliton, speed of process, but perhaps to the speed of change itself, then we thought, yeah, something…

• 00:03:29

  atmosphere of the time. This was the height of techno, of open air rave parties, of 25,000 people kind of motoring down to the M25 and gathering in a field and partying there all weekend, and to this relentless machine music. And so that was part of the spirit in which we organized it. As I say, part of almost a punk…

• 00:04:27

  And clearly something was going on that people, whatever Warwick University thought of it, people elsewhere took a lot of notice. It was important, you know, elsewhere. And so as an aspect of that history, I think that, you know, it deserves historical analysis on its own. There was an element of theater always…

• 00:05:57

  coupled to the body and it always functions with the body, constantly redefining it and possibly now redesigning it.