5 Burning Questions: Daniel Fine

In this episode of 5 Burning Questions, we talk with CSI Imaginary College Fellow Daniel Fine, the Principal Investigator for the Wonder Dome project.

In his 1984 film The Terminator and its sequels, James Cameron imagines a dystopic future in which armies of intelligent robots move with startling suddenness from positions of servility to utter and violent dominance, destroying civilization and driving humankind to the brink of extinction.

This, of course, is pure science fiction. There’s little reason to believe things will unfold that way. First, they would take all our jobs and wreck our economy.

This is the nightmare narrative of our future with robots and artificial intelligence. The utopian version of this tale—one accepted by many powerful people in industry and government—involves a …read more

In this episode, we talk with Doug Wolens, a documentary filmmaker best known for his films The Singularity and Butterfly.

This item was originally published by ASU News. Three Arizona State University researchers have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a workshop to build a global,

A voice cries out in the desert:

“Know thyself, not thy selfies!”

“Digital media will not save you!”

“The zero is not whole and the one is not The One!”

Technically, we’re not in the desert—we’re in a dusty parking lot in downtown Phoenix. And the voice is not coming from the Prophet Isaiah, but from professor Ron Broglio, whom I’ve ordained as a Minister of the Digital Tabernacle. As people wander into the massive circus tent at Arizona State University’s Emerge: Carnival of the Future, they are greeted by a pair of shifty evangelists preaching the analog Word. (Disclosure: …read more

The good thing about performing music with drones is that they always show up for rehearsal on time. The bad thing is that they might suddenly drop out of the air and onto your head.

I learned all this while putting together a piece called “Drone Confidential” for Arizona State University’s Emerge, a “Carnival of the Future” that was held in Phoenix recently. Emerge is an annual circus of cool new technologies in performance, dedicated to showing how artists and machines can work together to create something awesome. …read more

Wonder Dome, a new experiment in performance platforms directed by CSI’s Imaginary College Fellow Daniel Fine, will be premiering at Mesa Arts Center in the show “Oh, No! Not That Story!”

Space exploration has always been driven by both the imagination of the individual and the political will of nations. When the United States decided to go to the Moon it was an inherently political endeavor, part of the Cold War arms race; however, the majesty of the journey itself inspired the imaginations of millions of people to dream of traveling far beyond the Moon.

Near-future science fiction is notorious for its inaccurate predictions – from Blade Runner’s Replicants to the Back to the Future hover boards that people sarcastically mention at New Year’s parties. However, Kim Stanley Robinson’s dark political adventure Red Mars (1993) is spot-on with its predictions about virtual reality.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (1993) initially presents a markedly optimistic vision of the future. The terraforming technology he envisions has enormous potential: it enables colonists to leave an environmentally devastated planet Earth to create a utopian society out in space.

I recently read about the launches of both an “ultrasecure” mobile phone for protecting privacy and a clip-on camera that takes a picture of everything you do at 30-second intervals. Our cultural relationship with data is more complicated and contradictory than it has ever been, and our debates on the subject almost always center on privacy. But privacy, the notion that only you should be able to control information about yourself, cloaks a deeper tension between information and meaning, between databases and insights.

By Carolyn Corcoran, Downtown Devil

Check out the discussion that followed the Science Fiction TV Dinner screening of the first episode of The Walking Dead. Adam Chodorow, the Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, challenges the definitions of life and death in U.S. legislature and questions the applications of tax laws regarding zombies, avatars, and vampires.

Juan José Diaz Infante, the director of the Mexican Space Collective, visited Arizona State University to tell the story of how he brought together a team of artists, scientists and engineers to build a satellite, Ulises I, and launch it into space.