Pilgrims gather at the foot of the mountain by Philip Fagbeyiro.
Hello all.
It has been quite a while since the last edition of the newsletter! I hope you are all doing well wherever in the world you are? Things seem to still be in flux, but I hope that in the future, we will be able to look back on 2020 with the sort of shared camaraderie that makes it possible to reminisce about bizarre and unpleasant situations.
I apologise for the amount of time it has taken me to decide on what I wanted to do with the format of the newsletter itself, and the topics I was hoping to cover.
For reasons that will hopefully make sense when you listen(!) to the episode attached to this newsletter, I have decided to switch mediums altogether for subsequent editions and move from the written word, to the spoken word. I am still sorting out my setup for future recordings, but I hope you find this as refreshing a change to listen to as I do to produce it.
Please let me know what you think about the new format and any other thoughts you may have.
A lot has happened otherwise that I thought might be easier to summarise in text form though!
The Virtua Playgrounds 2 event went pretty well, even if I do say so myself. The contributions from all the participants in the Mass Village experiment on Discord were very inspiring and showed so much care, attention and vulnerability. And the follow-up conversations were very cool as well.
After that, I hosted a roleplaying session on Discord that ran for the better part of a week, developed in collaboration with Carmen Ho, Lyall Sprong and Philip Fagbeyiro. It was called “A Pilgrimage for Chrysalids” and was centred around a pilgrimage up a mountain to visit various sites that had various multimedia experiences created by the four of us and by the various participants.
Again, so much was shared that was unexpected, surprising and inspiring and I am hoping to be able to do one more before the end of the year that will be open to more people. It was also the first foray into the shared universe that I am creating with various collaborators for Newtype. A Speculative Fiction (SF) universe that is centred on imagining an alternative now that could act as inspiration for rethinking how Newtype approaches projects and systems.
Links
Virtua Playgrounds 2 Recording. (Heads up! 3 hours long)
Play, Player, Playground. Shaman, Fabulist, Fictionaut. (My presentation from the Virtua Playgrounds 2 session)
Ron Eglash - The Fractals at the Heart of African Designs
How Indigenous Thinking Can Change the World (States of Change Learning Festival chat with Tyson Yunkaporta)
Bonnitta Roy (Medium blog)
Newtype Character Creation Form (If you are interested in checking it out and creating your own Newtype alter-ego!)
What I am reading/watching/listening to
Undone (Amazon Prime) // TV series
Hiroshi Yoshimura Soundscape 1 (1986) (Thanks Seetal!) // Music
The Rain Formerly Known as Purple | Risk of Rain 2 Original Soundtrack (2020) (I am enjoying the entire album, but this track in particular…mmmmmmph) // Music
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta // Book
The Newtype #6 - Voice Note Edition