Welcome to our Virtual meeting!

Cénotaphe a Newton

And welcome to this interdisciplinary exploration of Virtual Worlds.

While Extropians wish for a better tomorrow and hope for their individual brains to one day be uploaded into the immortal being yet to come, reality has caught-up with them like a veritable unstoppable avalanche.

We are (you and me) uploading our consciousness, knowledge and experience, not as individuals but as a species every time we search for a word, an image, a concept. Every time we tag and bookmark the ‘cloud’ becomes more informed of our ways, thoughts and sensibilities or lack of them.

I thought appropriate to illustrate this first post for the class with Étienne-Louis Boullée's Cénotaphe a Newton, (1784). As one of the most interesting examples of "unbuilt architecture", it exemplifies what Katherine Hayles calls the "unfinish" nature of anything computer. And where else could the Cenotaphe exist but in the virtual world, itself an unfinished repository of illusion?