INSIDE LOOK: "Be The Death of Me" Investigation: Futurist Gray Scott

Our Project Director Ian Daniel interviewed Gray Scott, a futurist/neuro-technology-philosopher, as part of our broad investigation into death, dying, and the afterlife in NY for an installation performance "Be The Death of Me" on June 28th and 29th at the Irondale Center in Ft. Greene Brooklyn.  Details HERE.

Gray is also the editorial director of SERIOUS WONDER.com the online futurist philosophy, technology and consciousness magazine produced by his media company SERIOUS WONDER MEDIA™ based in NYC.

Learn more about Gray's work HERE.

Check out some excerpts from Gray's interview:

Uploading your consciousness is going to happen.  Everyone is uploading every single moment of their life, like what they had for breakfast, on social networks. That's the first stage of uploading consciousness.

I do think there will be consciousness factories so that just like on your cloud server you will back up your consciousness, however, we will do it more like a brain to computer interface--like a headband you wear.  And every day you download everything that happened to you in your computer and it all just goes into this cloud, and if you’re in a car accident or die of old age, they can replicate that consciousness into a machine.  You literally just jump from body to a machine without a separation.

I think what we are going to see in the future is an organism that is part machine and part organic.  So you could take your stems cells and literally grow a brain.  And if we could learn how to upload our consciousness into the substrate of an organic brain then we have a whole other scenario--even if our physical body dies, that consciousness goes on forever as long as the machine works.  You still have to maintain the machine but if we can capture that essence of who you are, who I am, then we potentially could live forever, and we could go anywhere in the universe.  We don’t need to breathe, a machine doesn’t need to breathe.  As long as you have a power source and we can do that with solar, as long as you’re plugged into a star, we’re talking. You could choose to leave earth and go explore deep space for eternity as long as you’re close enough to a star for energy.

Isn't the drive to create artificial intelligence, isn't it a cry against death?  I don't want to die so I'm going to create an artificial representation of myself in case I do.  I mean it's a very deep psychological process.  

Personally, I'm greedy and I want to live forever. I do. Because it's heartbreaking and inefficient to only live 80 years.  It’s such a short time, I feel cheated.  All of the work that you do throughout your life, all the preparation that you do for your intelligence, for your body. Think about how many times you go to the gym or think about how many meals you've cooked for yourself and just to have that swept away in one moment.  That bothers me.

Thanks so much to Gray and Ian for sharing. To hear more of Gray's interview come to "Be The Death of Me" June 28/29.

To read other excerpts from our investigation for "Be The Death of Me" go HERE.

Let Me Ascertain You: Podcast Series Launch!

Welcome to the very first episode Let Me Ascertain You: The Civilians Podcast Series!

Let Me Ascertain You is a weekly podcast series drawn from the company’s ongoing live cabaret series of the same title and including the best material from a decade of creative investigation. The episodes cover topics such as Occupy Wall Street, Atlantic Yards, the adult entertainment industry, Evangelical Christianity, and more.

Our first episode features performances of interviews about Atlantic Yards with Brooklynites about the controversy over the largest development project in Brooklyn's history. The site where the new Brooklyn Nets (formerly the New Jersey Nets) stadium is being built has been the source of extended and heated conflict, resulting in the enactment of eminent domain in New York State. This episode features the performance of interviews with Atlantic Yards bloggers, local business owners, residents, and activists, examining how the fate of Brooklyn and New York City is decided and what can be learned from this ongoing saga of politics, money, and the places we call home. The material was collected for the company's play In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards.

A lot of the performance is from our Let Me Ascertain You: Atlantic Yards cabaret last fall. It also includes a segment with Colleen Werthmann talking about what it was like to conduct interviews for In the Footprint. She talks specifically about the time that she spent with activist Patti Hagan (a prominent character in the play), and what Colleen has to say is really inspiring!

Featuring: Aysan Celik as a blogger, Colleen Werthmann as activist Patti Hagan, White People written by Michael Friedman and performed by Marsha Stephanie Blake, A scene at Levels Barbershop performed by Billy Eugene Jones and Marsha Stephanie Blake, and The Four Brooklyns written and performed by Michael Friedman

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

IN THE FOOTPRINT in the New York Times!

This is a fantastic article with great photos about In the Footprint! Here are a few tidbits:

"The songs in “In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards” (the creators call them blogosongs) serve not as emotional showstoppers but as commentary and explanation — the Greek chorus of the digital age."

"'Being an investigative theater company where we try to engage in important stories, this seemed like the most important local story that we could take on,' Mr. Cosson said recently over brunch in a cafe in Fort Greene."

"Forest City Ratner declined to be interviewed for the show, but Mr. Ratner and his colleagues are represented in others’ interviews and through public statements. (A spokesman for Forest City Ratner declined to comment for this article. The company was also the development partner for The New York Times Company headquarters in Manhattan.)"

Click HERE for the whole article (and to find out what Marty Markowitz has to say about the show)!

IN THE FOOTPRINT: Featured Video

How about a blog post about bloggers?



"Norman Oder - do you know him? He does the Atlantic Yards Report blog. He has a theory, that Brooklyn would be a large city in another place in the United States, it would have one or two papers, and they would have fully staffed newsrooms. He, he quotes another media person who says nowhere else in the United States are more people served by so little media. But we do have a lot of bloggers. One thing I think of as like the bloggers, I kinda think of - we're like a Greek chorus, basically. We tell people what's really going on. You could do like a Greek chorus in your show!"

Click here for an article by Norman Oder in his blog about the recent Atlantic Yards reporting.

More Atlantic Yards-related blog links to the right of this entry in "My Blog List."

Can you handle all the meta happening in this post?