Future Salon

Companion blog to the Original Future Salon. A group of Futurists and Changemakers that come together to discuss and collaborate around larger trends and what we can do to maximize human prosperity.

POW! [Power Our World] Future Salon – Movies that Move Us (to action?) & Make a Difference!

Join us tonight 8th of October 6pm PST at this link: https://meet.google.com/yap-iscr-jcd?hs=122&authuser=1

Yeah, just what you need another Zoom call :-) We promise this is different. Bring your favorite beverage and snack, relax and share impactful movies that moved you, maybe even to change your life in a positive way, which is a high bar. 

Tonight extra special as my cohost Zan Gill has invited the Dennis Britton, and he is going to share an impactful 8 minutes long short film tonight. I have not seen it yet, and am really excited about this evening. [I got some details wrong in the video, my apology].

I will open up with a song that was composed in 1679 when Vienna was in the grips of the Black Plague and it really uplifted them. A story of survival. 

Join us tonight 8th of October 6pm PST at this link: https://meet.google.com/yap-iscr-jcd?hs=122&authuser=1

Here is the flow: 

  1. Everyone on the call can suggest an impactful movie they want to share by adding it to this list. 

  2. We select a movie from the list and the person that suggested it briefly introduces the film. We will only select movies where the person who suggested it is present. 

  3. We watch the trailer together. 

  4. We discuss the movie for 5-10 minutes and explore: 

    • What lessons can be learned?  

    • What actions can be taken? 

  5. We select the next movie from the list and continue until the hour+ is up. 

See you this Thursday, October 8th @ 6pm (a flexible “Baker’s Hour”) to watch/ discuss trailers of your favorite impactful movies. 

Posted by Finnern on October 08, 2020 in Event, Events, Film, Fun, Music, video | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nano Movie without the Mouse

Molecular_mill_nanofactoryTo be honest I could never picture how molecular manufacturing actually would look like, not that I really tried.

How nice that over at Nanotechnology-Now they have a 4 minute animation that shows exactly that. And it is beautiful, it's magic, I want it now. That is the power of animation.

It's a collaborative project of animator and engineer, John Burch, and pioneer nanotechnologist, Dr. K. Eric Drexler.

It reminds me of one of my German television childhood favorites: Die Sendung mit der Maus (The show with the mouse) with cartoons and short documentaries in which they would take you to the factory and show you how for example Maple Syrup is made. That was over 30 years ago and the amazing thing is the show is still running. Wunderbar, life is good :-)

What I am missing in the video is the narration, but may be I just didn't get the audio running properly. [Link from our Responsible Nanotechnology friends with lots of comments]

Posted by Finnern on May 17, 2005 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

WMD Film Notes Plus Citizen Journalism Project

Frequency_of_misperceptions_tv_viewer

Notes from the Movie: Weapons of Mass Deception viewed last night and a very hopeful development around Dan Gillmor.

The filmmaker Danny Schaechter was at the movie and joked that he embedded himself in his living room to watch and record the TV news every move leading up and during the war, at least as much as he could stand.

I think this graph is a great illustration of the problem with the TV News. It is derived from a study done by PiPA Program in International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

Misconception throughout the board with varying degree of severity.

At Stanford last week ABC News president David Westin apologized to the American people for the poor coverage:

The executives also discussed their stations’ coverage leading up to the war in Iraq and failure to more carefully examine the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“[ABC] let down the American people,” Westin said. “I sincerely regret that.”

Random thoughts from the movie:

Continue reading "WMD Film Notes Plus Citizen Journalism Project" »

Posted by Finnern on December 12, 2004 in Film, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Interactive TV finally at an Amazon near you

Amazon_television The years old marketiers dream of interactive TV, where you can buy anything that is shown in the moving pictures right there is finally coming through at Amazon Television.

Lame-o story packed in a short film with Minnie Driver as the star to give it the air of sophistication. At the end of it you can buy the things you saw right there at Amazon. Great marketing idea, soso execution (BMW Films did a better job, probably better budget too). Still it will be a sure success and make Jeff Bezos more to shoot it into space, for the greater good of all of us I am sure.

Posted by Finnern on November 13, 2004 in Business, Film, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Jeff Thompson reviews Ghost in the Shell 2

ISAC board member Jeff Thompson wrote the following movie review of Ghost in the Shell 2 in contrast to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The review will appear in this week's Tech Tidbits, and is interesting enough to post here by itself. Jeff highlights the different motivations behind the scenarios (social commentary, future prediction), and reminds us that our baseline visions of the future can be woefully far from the direction in store for us--no matter how futuristically on the ball we try to be ;-).

Jeff's review:

Ghost

Last week's Tech Tidbits linked an article by James Pinkerton comparing two current movies, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, set in the 1930's, and Ghost in the Shell 2, set in the 2030's. Sky Captain is not really an attempt to visualize the future, but rather to nostalgically present how people viewed the future in the 1930's. There are airplanes that turn into submarines, wrist radios and giant mechanical robots. The movie does reveal one fascinating thing: for all their imagination, no one in the 1930's imagined the most important development which the future would bring only a decade later: the electronic computer. At the core of robots in the movie are gears, not digital processors. Power is about having bigger metal feet that can crush cars, not about being able to manipulate information faster. (It wasn't until 1937 that Alan Turing showed that a general purpose computer, like the one you're reading this article on, was mathematically possible.)

Contrast this with Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, which gets it. There are many reviews, like this one which will confirm that the mix of hand-drawn animation and 3D computer graphics is gorgeous. At the end of the first Ghost in the Shell movie, the main character's police partner is basically uploaded, becoming pure information on the world's data networks. In the second movie, he wanders through the sensory overloaded urban landscape, vaguely missing his partner and trying to solve a case. He mostly does this by interviewing one person after another who questions what it means to feel like an individual when the world has so clearly been shown to be a just sea of information created by ubiquitous computing and instant communications which link everything. Among the philosophizing and eye-popping scenery, there is indeed a plot involving the case (remember the movie title) which is a literary device to ask the question: In a world where information devices can turn the whims of anyone, even a little girl, into a reality that reaches out across the world, who can truly be innocent? Both the main character and his uploaded partner (and hopefully the audience if they were paying attention) are left wondering how to proceed when physical space has been turned into mind space, and like it or not your fate can be determined by the naive - but not innocent - impulses of a random child. Maybe even the ever-resourceful Sky Captain would realize that the threat in the future is not an army of giant robots, but the precipice of confusion and cognitive dissonance.

end review

Jeff's website (thefirst.org) has a new paper outlining his perception of how minds percieve perception. It's titled, fittingly, The Orders of Perception and I'm sure feedback would be appreciated from those so inclined.

Posted by Jerry Paffendorf on October 06, 2004 in Film, Long Term Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Passion-ing" the Day After Tomorrow

I just love the word "Passion-ing" and it looks like a good case as usual from our friends at: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: "Passion-ing" the Day After Tomorrow

I've heard a lot of talk about doing it, but so far, no one's picked up on Jon Stahl's idea of coordinating a nationwide "passion-ing" of The Day After Tomorrow.

Let's see if we can get some people together for the opening weekend May 28th. I am all for it.

I just hope it is better than The Day After which I have seen a long time ago and it left me frustrated back then, with the "Oh, well, life goes on" end. I am not sure about that one, may be it was something else.

Posted by Finnern on May 04, 2004 in Film | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Come and see Robot Stories this Saturday

Machine LoveOur L.A. spies tell us, that Robot Stories is a great movie. They should know, after all they live in L.A. Here the synopsis:

Winner of over 30 awards, "Robot Stories" is science fiction from the heart, four stories in which utterly human characters struggle to connect in a world of robot babies, robot toys, android office workers, and digital immortality.

Sounds like a Future Salon kind of movie. Although, last time I thought that was, when we went to see A.I. and somehow that was a bit disappointing. If I recall correctly there were no negative signals coming from the Hollywood crowd, but this time we have real actionable intelligence non of this artificial stuff :-).

Continue reading "Come and see Robot Stories this Saturday" »

Posted by Finnern on April 14, 2004 in Events, Film | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (3)

The Future's Past


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