
photograph by Christo Doherty
Upgrade! Johannesburg and WSOA DIVA Talk
Athena Mazarakis and Tegan Bristow
By Pippa Stalker
“Presence and Absence…”
[Watch a slideshow of images from the Coming To performance.]

photograph by Christo Doherty
Upgrade! Johannesburg and WSOA DIVA Talk
Athena Mazarakis and Tegan Bristow
By Pippa Stalker
“Presence and Absence…”
[Watch a slideshow of images from the Coming To performance.]

Matt Groening & Futurama co-creator, David X. Cohen, in Groening’s studio.
Wired magazine have revealed that Futurama, Matt Groening’s animation project after The Simpsons, is back for a second series.
Fans will remember that Futurama, one of the most anticipated animated TV series of all time, was abruptly cancelled after 72 episodes.
The reasons for the cancellation remain obscure, but it was most likely because the series didn’t generate the kind of mass
following that was achieved by The Simpsons. Nevertheless, the quirky SF series became a cult-item with a dedicated audience
of fans. In particular, the series deliberately aimed at "freeze framers", those obsessive fans who would record the show to videotape so that they could examine the animation frame by frame for erudite and arcane code and messages:
"One of the great things about the show was the instantaneous, intense fan reaction," Groening says. It operated on several levels, rewarding multiple viewings, and it was full of catnip for geeks: In addition to the riffs on The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars, there were allusions to classic videogames, programming languages, Schrdinger’s cat, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
"The operating principle of Futurama was that you can do a joke that 1percent of the audience gets, as long as it doesn’t derail the enjoyment of the mass audience," Cohen says. "And that 1 percent becomes a fan for life.
Hopefully the next Futurama will come to African TV screens shortly . . .

Between May and July 2007, Claudia Wegener and Terry Humphrey, two radio obsessed artists in London - have been running a series of weekly workshops, drop-in radio sessions and live broadcasts on Resonance104.4fm under the title ‘NO-GO-ZONES’. The audio artists have been working with a young production team of students from Camberwell College of Art and teenagers from the area of South London collecting recordings, conducting interviews with individuals or reports about groups around ‘no-go-zone’ experiences we encounter in our daily lives. Out with their studio van, they made recordings of individual lives’ stories and of group debates. The result of this activity is a growing archive of people’s no-go-zone stories, issues and concerns.
Claudia and Terry are inviting participants from the rest of the world to get involved in the latest manifestation of the no-go-zones project, entitled
influence100
They will be delighted to hear from participants who are encouraged to download and remix files from their archive and to contribute original sound recordings to the project.
further information is available on:
http://www.myspace.com/nogozones
http://www.nogozones.wordpress.com
Claudia and Terry can be contacted via nogozones@hotmail.co.uk
From tomorrow, Chinese internet users in Bejing will have their surfing interrupted every half hour by these two virtual characters. Their purpose is to remind the hapless Chinese surfers that their browsing habits are being monitored. Porn is cited as the main reason for the policing; but the control almost certainly extends to terms such as "Tibet", "Democracy", and Taiwan etc. From our Western perspective, the Chinese control of the Internet seems sinister and Big Brotherish. We’ve also seen how big US Web companies such as Yahoo and Google have got their hands dirty through their involvement in this control of Chinese users. However these character designs, clearly drawing from the Anime tradition, show that control can be presented as cute and rather fun . . . .

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"One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi" William Gibson, from his recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine.