I saw this (kinda only just so so)movie last night called 'Visions'

Initially it seemed like a horror movie - a woman who was seeing things in a (maybe) haunted house (or maybe she was just crazy).

In the end it turned out that she was seeing premonitions of what was to come. That is, an attack on her and her husband. So - the chair that mysteriously moved on its own across the room was actually a chair that she moves (in the future) when she is trying to stop an attacker.

At one point it is explained that some moments ripple across time similar to a pebble being thrown in water. But in this story the moments of time ripple in both directions.

So - she, and every woman who had lived in the house prior to her (back thru the 1800s) were privy to seeing the effects of that moment yet to come.

Essentially - it was time travel (of energy??) - in both directions.

I thought it was an interesting take on a usual idea.

I have been thinking a lot about how one would know another was in fact a time traveler.

What would be the clues? would we recognize it right away (or even believe it at all?)

Reading a lot about John Titor - a supposed time traveler from 2036 (in 2000 and 2001)

I was looking up chronopolitics and came across this - haven't watched it yet

SPECULATIONS: Science Fiction, Chronopolitics, & Social Change Part 1: Introduction + performance by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Defstar.

a time machine that can only travel to the future.

even when it returns it can only return to the future time of when it left. as a method of survival (assuming progress continues in only a forward direction).

time periods i would not ever want to find myself landing in via a time machine...

"Black people can't fuck with time machines. A black guy and a time machine is like hey, if it's before 1980, no thank you - I don't wanna go." - Louis C.K.

a story about a woman who accidentally gets caught in a web of plants actively communicating with one another. she is literally caught, she can't escape, but in that moment is able to understand all of their communciations. it's not quite like hearing but just knowing. and in that moment she realizes that the way she thought the world was is actually so much more vast. time unfolds differently and under a different set of rules. things that previously had been invisble to her are now visible. it's as if she's traveled to another world.

it's not a fantasy, though, it's more like she can see her own life/world within the context of this embedded one. (it's not just a world of plants that she sees but her own- but within the rules of how this new world operates).



from: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/aug/04/plants-intelligent-sentient-book-brilliant-green-internet

- To solve their energy needs, most plants turn to the sun – in some cases literally.

- Some plants have taken a different route, however, supplying themselves with energy by preying on animals, including everything from insects to mice to even birds.

- Many plants use complex trickery to lure in pollinators, communicating either through direct deception or rewards.

- plants have evolved an incredible variety of toxic compounds to ward off predators.

- Plants are both tricky and thrifty.

- plants have at least 20 different senses used to monitor complex conditions in their environment. According to Mancuso, they have senses that roughly correspond to our five, but also have additional ones that can do such things as measure humidity, detect gravity and sense electromagnetic fields.

- Plants are also complex communicators. plants communicate in a wide variety of ways. The most well known of these is chemical volatiles – but scientists have also discovered that plants also communicate via electrical signals and even vibrations.

- “Plants are wonderful communicators: they share a lot of information with neighbouring plants or with other organisms such as insects or other animals.

- Many plants will even warn others of their species when danger is near. If attacked by an insect, a plant will send a chemical signal to their fellows

- “...plants are endowed with feeling, weave complex social relations and can communicate with themselves and with animals,”

- Plants also largely live on a different timescale than animals, moving and acting so slowly that we hardly notice they are, indeed, reacting to outside stimuli.

February 3, 2016

Light comes in slivers from a window between two blowing curtains. It flashes once, twice, then faster as the wind picks up. She is standing in the kitchen, filling a glass of water from a lightly running tap. The light slows for a moment, then picks back up. It catches her eye and she finds she is unable to look away. As the flashes gain in speed and consistency a sound starts to rise in volume. It is a loud hum. Quiet at first then overwhelmingly present. She is caught by it's specific and deliberate seeming rhythm. She hasn't moved, her body caught in the same place. For a brief moment the light from the window hits the glass in her hand, now overflowing from the continually running tap. There is a flash. A flash from another time. Some future time.

Einstein concluded in his later years that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

The flashes come slowly at first, then in a steady stream. She sees herself. At least, she think's its herself. Then, again. She is in some other place. Not quite this place but then again, not quite another. For a brief moment she considers it could be a kind of dejà-vu. A dejà vu unlike any other dejà vu. Is it possible to experience dejà vu from the future? It is all very familiar but also entirely not so. None of this has happened yet.

There are some fundamental truths: time travels slower the faster a person moves.

Now, in this other time she senses a taste. A flavour of a kind of bubble gum. Cold. Pink. For a brief moment it is unclear to her which time is real. This one? Or this one? But maybe neither of those things is right. The past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

A powerful breeze rushes in then quickly pulls back out through the window. The curtains snap back and stop blowing almost instantaneously. The light retracts from the glass of water and the loud hum ends with a hard cut. She turns off the tap and the running water. It might have been an hour, or three weeks, or several years.

Time can be experienced as something else in this world.

Resolution the size of a blanket

Feb 3, 2016

She didn't realize until later that it was a warning, and by then it had happened for real.
Perhaps it was a version of herself that sent it, or perhaps a neighbour or colleague or car wash attendant or cashier or mortician. The first time it had been in passing, she had caught a glimpse of the bud in the reflection of the window as she was grocery shopping for pulses. It was the year of the pulse, but last year had also been the year of the pulse, because the drought had hit pretty badly. The glimpse of the bud in the reflection of the window was not in colour, it was in black and white because it was in fact a xeroxed poster of a flower arrangement, and the bud was angled off to the side slightly, [a spider has just appeared from the folds of a bank statement pinned to the wall before me, i can see it's little pale leg from the corner of the paper] the bud was angled off to the side slightly because it was tilting towards an unseen sun, but the bud was already desiccated and hollow, twenty three holes gaping in symmetry, tilting towards the sun unseeing. A shudder rippled through her and she passed the reflection in the window and carried on to the perspex bins full of dried lentils, mung, and dahl. In a fog, she plunged the little metal shovel into the lentils, held the plastic bag open and looked down. The lentils poured all over the floor and over her sandals, and she let out a scream from her throat as the lentils slipped in between her bare toes and under the crevices of the sandal straps. She tried to shake the cold, dry circles out and felt herself choking. They felt like scales or parts of dead things.

Three days later she looked through a crack in the curtains and prepared herself to see the twenty three gaping holes. There was an increasingly dense knot forming in her stomach, and she knew that this image was easier than the reality. Looking through the curtain, she caught a sliver of the front lawn and the sedan parked out front, none of which were as real as the hollow pockets forming somewhere inside her. The holes would grow, yawning open, tissues like wax melting away and the cloistered patterns merging into a single gaping maw. It was something she tried to read about, on the first day, to make sense of. There was a way of transmitting not information but a sensation to be interpreted, a coded affect, and a technique for accomplishing this consciously across generations, one had to learn how to interpret the affect. On the second day she followed an thread in an online forum about sinking into the feeling, to follow the thread of the aversion to a real cause and effect - what was she supposed to learn from the bloody honeycomb expanding in her thorax? There had to be a sensible message. There was an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Data codes a warning into a poker game card selection - the appearance of an ace of hearts (?) would warn his next self that the Enterprise was stuck in a time loop. But on the third day, when she could no longer fully turn away from the twenty three black holes printed behind glass, she supposed that there was no logical message, it was a matter of dread; another year of the pulse.

If re-hydration was a method of time-travel

Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time.

When I was a kid I read the shit out of this book. It was the first time I had a crush on a fictional character, or rather the first time I identified with a character to such a degree that I would share her crush. I didn't know it was sci-fi or fantasy or anything; I just preferred it to Judy Blume.
Space-time is described as a cloth that can be wrinkled, the fastest way to get from A to B.
The protagonist makes a sandwich with liverwurst and tomato and I would do the same and always call it a 'Meg sandwich'.
I also never recognized how much children's fiction and particularly sci-fi or fantasy fiction were instruments of Christian values.

March 9, 2016

A girl is in the pool
A girl is swimming laps in the pool,
Swimming laps in the medium lane
An aquafit class is pumping in the smaller pool, the tinny thumping of aerobic music ebbing into the large pool where the girl is swimming laps
A pool and a health clinic, where girls and boys are prescribed laps to hydrate and regain their shape
A health clinic to bring girls and boys back into shape after they have been drained to last through the last drought.
The last drought was the second worst in recent times, the one before the last was the worst.
In the one before the last, they realized almost too late and took a page from the book of fish farmers
Girls and boys undergo draining and after three seasons of drought, they are ready to regain their shape through weekly prescribed laps
A girl is swimming and she hears the thumping and vague splashing waft over from the smaller pool, but when her head goes underwater she doesn’t hear it anymore
A girl is underwater and her eyes are open and she breathes sharply and claws her way to the surface in a panic
A girl coughs violently and her nose and throat burn as the water sprays out of her head
With her eyes open underwater a girl hears something that she is unable to distinguish from seeing,
She is unsure if she has heard or seen
She is unsure what part of her head it was,
Did she hear or see it underwater?
She looks at her fingers
She looks at the wrinkles in her fingers
She is unsure if the wrinkles are from too much or not enough water

A girl coughs violently and is unable to to distinguish what she has seen or heard
A woman barks and she is aware of the time, the counter indicating the prescribed laps remaining in her session
A girl goes back underwater and holds her breath
She opens her eyes and is unable to tell where she is feeling the sound that she is now certain is not imagined
A girl stays underwater and does not swim
The counter does not move
A girl stays underwater not breathing
A sound comes before the girl and waits and considers before moving through her
A sound moves through the girl and it is an image
A girl stays underwater and does not breathe
A sound passes through her body that is flaccid and wrinkled with either too much or not enough water
A sound is an image and it is behind her eyes
A girl sees an image and it is the cover of a book
A girl recognizes the cover of a book and the taste of a sandwich
A taste that can be surprisingly metallic and rancid in some bites, and pungent and creamy in others
The counter does not move and above the surface of the water a woman barks
A girl hears a sound and a woman barking
A girl breathes slowly
Bubbles slowly rise to the surface in a line from the corner of her mouth
A girl retains the image of the cover of a book
The cover of a book and the taste of a sandwich and the trace of thought that a character explains
A character explains that a wrinkle can be a way of moving quickly
A wrinkle can move a person faster than a person can move herself
The trace of a thought that a character explains that is half remembered but not as clearly as the cover of a book and the taste of a sandwich
A thought that was very heavy at the time when it was first read
A girl remembers neither more nor less about the first reading
A girl is poised to take on a shape similar to her shape at the first reading
A girl is prescribed several more laps in order to take on a shape from a previous time
A girl retains a taste and an image from a previous time
A girl is unsure of where in her head the image starts and the sound ends

March 8, 2016

Write 3 (4) intros for the main protagonist

She is sitting inside a gazebo reading. Madly reading her favourite book which she has read thousands of times before. She looks up for a brief moment, suddenly distracted by a flash of light in the otherwise cloudless sky. They have been waiting for the asteroid to hit. It is expected. She folds the bottom corner of the page she was reading, closes the book and places it firmly in her lap. She looks back up at the sky - more deeply now - and waits. Waits for whatever might be next.

She is standing in a long, slow moving line at her neighbourhood liquor store waiting to check out. For a moment its as if she neither sees nor thinks and she becomes aware of this. She imagines it's what being caught in a vacuum feels like. When she becomes aware of her surroundings again, she notices the woman in line in front of her. It's odd because she doesn't recall the woman from before. It's as if she's just appeared. It can't be though, she can't have just appeared like that. There isn't enough room in the aisle for her to have cut in front of her like that without noticing. She stares at the woman's back more intently. The woman seems off some how, like she doesn't quite belong. It's hard to tell exactly why she thinks this but it's almost like the woman has a greyish glow to her. It can't be though, people don't glow like that. It must be the lighting in here. She holds her breath as the woman in front of her begins to slowly turn around, not sure why exactly or what purpose holding her breath might serve.

She is holding onto a silver box the size of a loaf of bread. The box, she's been told, will take her to whatever time she wants to visit. She longs for escape, to be someplace else and this seems to be her only solution. She's not quite sure how to make it work, or what the steps are to turn it on. As she contemplates what to do she begins to feel silly, unsure if any of this is real. Why did she believe that this could be real? As she contemplates the box begins to feel warm to the touch. As it heats up it turns a slight metallic silver colour.

She is standing in her garden in the back yard tending to the weeds. Her garden is the only place where she feels comfortable these days, where she feels most herself. The flowers have started to bloom and open up wide with the morning sun. She wonders what it would be like to turn on and off so quickly like that - how the flowers do. She is standing in her garden and it is noon. The sun beats down from directly above her. As she stands in the garden the flowers suddenly turn to face left all at once all .

This was (is) today

Sounds as causes and events

Scientists Zapped Mouse Brains with Lasers to Bring Back Lost Memories

Minute Physics has joined the ongoing conversation about transporters and logical paradoxes with a really quick and concise explanation of the no-cloning theorem. The theorem postulates an that an object cannot be duplicated while in a quantum state, thus making human teleportation impossible.

…quantum teleportation has one pivotal property: it is impossible to create an identical copy of a quantum state without destroying the original – in fact, you HAVE to destroy the original arrangement in order to extract all the necessary information from it to construct the new, teleported, state. In fact, the relevant theorem in quantum mechanics is called the “no cloning” theorem. Now, we don’t yet know exactly how brains work to create consciousness, but if the quantum states of some electrons somewhere in the brain are critical to perfectly determining (and thus copying) “you”, then a teleporter would necessarily have to obey the rules of quantum teleportation when sending the information about the arrangement of particles that are “you” to the new location, and whatever was left behind would definitively *not* be you.

How False Memory Changes What Happened Yesterday
It's such a terrifying but beautiful notion that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past.

As We Become Cameras
Wearable cameras will be ubiquitous. We’ll barely notice.

url:
https://medium.com/@mhkt/as-we-become-cameras-ac142f9a8bb5#.cvv0g7nar

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).

—Susan Sontag, “The Image-World” (1973)

What happens when images are integrated as fully into our reality as time?

Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time.

The most commonly or widely spoken language in 2070 (or whatever...in 50 years) 

A factory for all the small things; all things that are smaller than a 3-in-1 printer. They make everything in this category and there is no distinction in value.

All the possible flavours in one dish. My friend Dom's dad is devising a concentric ringed pizza, each ring is a different flavour, every flavour. There is no distinction between savoury, sweet, sour, etc.. And no distinction between what is eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Or when you eat. Everything is eaten in public.

You dry the fruit/fish/fungus whatever on the roof, then you soak it to make a soup, then you dessicate it (for space travel). And you have the taste but no semblance of texture.

The closet of time and space (the beginnings of a description)

1. The closet of time and space exists in a fixed location.

2. While standing inside the closet all time becomes visible. All of time - the time from before and the time that is yet to come - is mapped out in visible form.

3. The map, made up of beams of blue and red, visualizes the distance between the past and the future.

4. Those times (of the past, the present and the future), deemed as "bad" times are represented by the combination of all wavelengths of light. That is, they appear as white light.

5. To overcome the distance between the blue and red beams of light is to travel through time.

6. When traveling through time in the closet of time and space it is easy to skip over the white beams of light.

7. Thus one can travel without ever leaving the closet of time and space.

I've been saving this for the right time: 

ALGORITHMS AT HEART
let's dissect and see how all the parts work

A New Hope is a series of expanded workshops, publication and collaborative video installation consisting of screenings, talks and presentations dedicated to exploring science fiction worldbuilding as women of colour.

A New Hope is a Project by:

list of shows and things to sample from for expanded workshops

SPECIFIC EPISODES/SHOWS/CLIPS
*Star Tek The Next Generation:S1 E12 --> Picard on the holodeck (1940s San Francisco) --> throughout entire episode
*Star Tek The Next Generation:S1 E20 -->5.30mins --> visual acuity transmitter
*Star Tek The Next Generation:S1 E24 --> non-linear time (repetition and loops) (also at 24mins)
*Star Tek The Next Generation:S1 E26 --> 18mins - replicator; 25mins - the new future world (no longer strive for power, or accumulate things...) 36mins -- cloaking device

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
GENERAL VIEWING LIST
Battlestar Galactica
Born in Flames
Black Mirror
Dark city (have we talked about this? I always show the intro in narrative classes - world building from frame 1 - I haven’t seen it in years, Rufus Sewell? I remember liking it, gotta re-watch)
Her
Meek's Cutoff
Moon
Space: Above and Beyond
Star Trek (Original, TNG)
Star Wars (Episodes 4 - 6; The Force Awakens)
Sunshine
The Hunger Games (1&2)
The Lobster
The 100
Womb

GENERAL READING LIST
Donna Haraway
Margaret Atwood
Octavia Butler
Oulipo
Ray Bradbury
I See You - Damon Knight
Solitude - Ursula K. LeGuin
Utopia - Sir Thomas More
** Sci Fi Encyclopedia
http://kalanation.blogspot.ca/2008/02/black-feminist-manifesto.html


TO CHECK OUT
http://www.futurelibrary.no/
http://katiepaterson.org/candle/katie_paterson_candle_drawing.pdf
http://trondheimkunstmuseum.no/en/events/melanie-gilligan-the-common-sense/
http://www.the8thclimate.org/en/infra_school/

The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy is a non-circulating research collection of over 72,000 items of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction, as well as magic realism, experimental writing and some materials in 'fringe' areas such as parapsychology, UFOs, Atlantean legends etc.
(at the Lillian H. Smith Library)
http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/merril/location-hours.jsp

SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE

A FREE sci-fi video workshop. Fill out an application form here, or in-person at our offices in Suite 240 of Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St. E). Deadline Friday November 4th, 2016.

Have you ever imagined a future world where everyone could understand every language, where we could fly, or travel back in time? Join media artists Serena Lee and Christina Battle for a video workshop to create a future world, by exploring science-fiction films and stories from perspectives that are beyond the mainstream. We’ll be looking at how white, male-dominated popular culture has defined both harmoniously perfect future worlds (utopia) and apocalyptic future worlds (dystopia) and then write our own.In this workshop we will share ideas about alternative futures in the Regent Park neighbourhood, and get hands-on experience with a 360º camera to collaboratively write and produce our own science fiction video, set in the strangest world — right where we live!

http://regentparkfilmfestival.com/program/visiting-other-dimensions/

FOUR EXAMPLES OF
DEVICES THAT FACILITATE
INTER-DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL

Shelter to Protect from Spontaneous Inter-dimensional Travel