My interests in time and in what is "really real" meet this week in an exhibit and discussion at Trinity Square Video in downtown Toronto.  I'll be talking duration and solidity with German filmmaker Isabell Spengler, whose exhibition Two Days at the Falls will be showcased at the galllery.  This should be a mind-bending excursion to the edges of what we know, and I'm really looking forward to it--so come join us, April 8 at 6:30 p.m. at 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376.  We're right at Spadina so the easiest access by TTC is the Spadina Streetcar; there are numerous Green-P and Blue-P parking garages in the neighbourhood as well.  For more information about the event and the gallery's ambitious science-fiction oriented programme, check out the press release.

The video of the IDF2012 Zero-day panel on science fiction prototyping is now viewable online. The whole thing is 86 minutes long, but it's worth it because we cover a lot of ground.

The best quote is near the end, and it belongs to Madeline Ashby, who describes our current selves as being 'like hermit crabs' leaving behind the shells of our discarded technologies as we evolve.

It was great fun, and I'd like to thank Brian, Joe, Harlene and Christina for keeping us organized--and of course, the Intel researchers who actually came up with the real prototypes that we subsequently wrote our stories about.

Nikola Danaylov sat down in my living room last week and grilled me for over an hour about my thoughts on technology, the Singularity, and my alternatives to it. The whole interview can be seen here, or downloaded as a podcast; be warned, it covers a huge amount of ground and I don't get much chance to fully flesh out the ideas I'm throwing around. Hence much of it may sound like gibberish. 

There is much that I told Nikola that bears extensive expansion and I would love to lay out these ideas (eg. about the Technological Maximum and the Rewilding) in a book... but only when somebody pays me to write it. I am sadly unable to take on a project like that without backing anymore; I'd starve before I finished the thing.

Meanwhile, others seem to be discovering my work. There's a new review of Lady of Mazes on The Atlantic's website! It's a pretty awesome exploration of the key themes of the novel; I have to say that, seven years after the novel came out, people finally seem to be ready for the conversation that it proposes. Should we control the technologies that influence our lives, or do we willy-nilly spin the roulette wheel of technological change and simply accept what comes out of it? This is the question Lady of Mazes asks; there could be no more relevant a question for the present, yet when the book first came out, there wasn't much said about that aspect of the story. People didn't really... get it. Now, it seems they're starting to.

I'm still not able to embed just any arbitrary video, but YouTube comes in just fine (unless you use certain flavours of Internet Explorer [but who would?]):

I've also added a static page for this and other videos I've done.  It's at www.kschroeder.com/about/video.  Check it out, because it also links to spots I've done for TVO's The Agenda and Michigan's Cult Pop videocast.