New Worlds of the 21st Century. Exploring Rilao Part 1

Jan 12

New Worlds of the 21st Century. Exploring Rilao Part 1

, by Rory Fellowes | Eventcoverage

A New World

Evidence of the existence of the Island of Rilao, in the South Pacific is piling up. Rilao is an almost circular island enclosing an archipelago, collectively and colloquially referred to as the Island.

The first recorded reports of its existence were made in 1895, when the Merchant Marine Captain Raymond Lao ran his ship onto the rocks of the outer island. This might have been the end of it, but in this century further exploration has been undertaken, and a lot more information and evidence has been assembled. Stories, investigations, explorers reports, videos and physical items emanating from there are in existence and many of them were put on display in October 2014 at the University of Southern California.

From The Rilao Archive © 5D Institute 2014

Rilao is situated several hundred miles more or less due west of Ecuador in South America. Below is a map that shows you the archipelago’s location. Zoom in to see it in detail, and out to see its location in relation to the South American continent.

The structural design and cultural roots of Rilao derive from what members of the faculty working with the 5D Institute often refer to as “the DNA” of Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, but evolved now into an entirely new and unique culture. Since that initial discovery, we have learnt that, after decades of disruption, plagued by disease and political chaos, the people of the archipelago have developed their own revolutionary technology, some might even call it rebellious, built in a kind of socially approved, unfettered environment for hackers.

The power source for this remote community comes in a form of energy derived from Muka Tree Oil, the archipelago’s principle product, farmed in the forests that cover the main island that surrounds the inner sea and shelters the inner islands.

Real Reality and Virtual Reality

That is the poetic explanation. We could call it the virtual truth.

The prosaic explanation, the reality if you will, is that Rilao is an intellectual concept developed by the World Building class and lab as part of the Media Arts + Practice division at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, and developed principally as a computer generated virtual world, but with real world artefacts and other forms of solid evidence created to enhance the concept, to make it credible.

The World Building curriculum is the brain child of its Director, Professor Alex McDowell, and its work is the product of his direction and the creative energies of his team. World Building is a concept much in discussion these days, and the Rilao Project is a detailed and extensive experiment in this creative endeavour. As John Seely Brown remarked in his talk (see below), quoting his colleague Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is just to invent the future”, or at least, as John went on to say, to enact the future. He then quoted McDowell to say, “the best way to envision, and socialize, the future is through the future reality of world building”. John pointed to Alex McDowell’s Production Design work for “Minority Report”, which is probably one of the best known and certainly most clearly visualised versions of this kind of future thinking. This is the topic of all good science fiction, but the interesting thing in our time is how what was once merely fantasy and fiction is being taken seriously as a way to envisage and, more importantly, plan for the future of our world and our society as it comes to terms with the technological advances of the last 50 years. What has been regarded in the past as science fiction is now future reality.

The first World Building Festival was held in April, 2008, the year in which the 5D Institute was first established. The Science Of Fiction event evolved from these early world building discussions into a festival that sets out to deal in the power of vast collaboration: the one-hundred-percent participation of upwards of 250 creative minds across diverse disciplines. The intention is to re-examine the creative and narrative process of fiction creation, mainly in film, TV, in fact, all forms of media entertainment, and to an extent, real world considerations that arise from this.

In January, 2014, Professor McDowell and his colleague Ann Pendleton-Jullian established the Rilao Project as part of the work of Professor McDowell’s World Building class, and the Science Of Fiction Festival in October 2014 was focused on this wide-ranging and inventive project.

If you can imagine it then you can make it

In conversation prior to the Festival, Professor McDowell explained to me something of what the 5D Institute and the World Building Media Lab are aiming to achieve.

“The 5D Institute is the discussion and outreach space. It’s called a USC-organised research unit. It’s primarily about building a network for discussion and enquiry. We look into the future of narrative, how should we be thinking about the technology, how can we tell new stories and what is the audience and the platform for those stories? That sort of ties in with the development of new delivery systems. What are the delivery systems? Do the delivery systems change the narrative methodology of the storytelling? Do the delivery systems require a retraining of the audience, to better exploit the narrative content?

“But mostly for me, because my interest is about inception, the front end of the creative process, inception, ideation, prototyping and then making, the execution of that. It’s very much about the weave between the components of storytelling, how do you tell better stories, how should we rethink the traditions of storytelling? We’re looking at the way in which you make stories, how we change the way you tell stories, which is very much about the production process and technology meeting the creative process, and how they inform each other.

“We’ve discovered, to a great extent that the demands of the story actually change the technology, that we have a very fluid relationship now with the technology and capability component of story creation. We’re only constrained by imagination. There’s no physical, tangible, experiential constraints really remaining.

“If you can imagine it then you can make it, is our approach.

“So if we’re liberated in the way we tell stories and if we don’t self-constrain, then the demands we make on the technology from the story, so for instance, why can we not tell this kind of story, what if we could imagine this kind of world, forces the technology to adapt. We want to put pressure on the technology space by using imaginative processes to make demands on the technology. But of highest importance to us is the ability for this approach to weave new stories, and to place them front and centre to the research we are doing.”

Imagination drives the new technology. This is inspiring and it is terrifying. Outside of the parameters of this article we are all aware, surely, that there are arenas of technology that could, if someone were to imagine such a thing, transform and disrupt things that we have for all of human history taken for granted, right up to and including what it is to be a human being.

In the world of entertainment media, the effect of new technology is on the whole benign, enhancing the audience’s experience, as well as being an invaluable boon to all media industries. What the world building curriculum and the World Building Media Lab are attempting, is both to understand and to lead the way that technology is used creatively to build new forms of narratives, out of virtual worlds as the backbone of future entertainment media. A mighty task. To discuss this with as broad a group as they could assemble, to explore this revolution in creative thinking, the Science Of Fiction Festival was established.

I was invited to join that illustrious gathering at The Science Of Fiction Festival in Los Angeles during one glorious weekend in October, 2014, and thus I entered the World of Rilao.

The Sound Of Rilao: Club Circulo

The Festival began on the first evening, Friday October 24th, with Club Circulo, a music and light event to kick off the conference. The Music of Rilao was the theme and the whole thing was a blast, in almost every sense of the word! Loud, raucous and delightful.

In Club Circulo © Susan Karlin 2014

On entering the space we were greeted with a roar of music and a lightshow on a large transparent screen. Shimmering images and land or sea-like images appeared on the screen, activated and altered by the music and by the noises generated by members of the audience beating on an assortment of metal surfaces with plastic tubing, each beat causing, via some internal programming, a shift in the patterns of light playing on the screen. In a very abstract way, the Sound of Fiction was attempting to use the inherent alchemy of spontaneous collaboration through musical improvisation as a metaphor for the creative process when it is shared and simultaneous, rather than linear and industrial.

In other words, “The Sound Of Rilao” was created by overlaying a basic drum and bass soundtrack with the random, though to a degree rhythmic drumming of the audience’s playing. In their introduction to this evening’s entertainment, this form of music creation is described as “Synchromedia – a multi-disciplinary live, living technology multi-platform practice.” Not sure there was much discipline at work, but the effect was mesmerising.

Later in the evening a band called [namethemachine], led by Glen Matlock, erstwhile founder member of the Sex Pistols and an old friend of Professor McDowell, took to the stage. They played a kind of improvisational formless music, heavily driven by Glen’s bass. The other musicians were Matt Davis, Earl Slick of the David Bowie band playing guitar, Steve Fishman on keyboard, and Slim Jim Phantom from the Stray Cats on drums. They were accompanied by Four Color Zack, the Red Bull DJ scratch artist champion.

It reminded me a little of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd back in 1965 or so, but with the inestimable bonus that the musicians in [namethemachine] have a much more sophisticated approach to this sort of syncopated Rock ‘n’ Roll, after all the intervening years of experimentation and refinement. The decades have brought a lot of serious musicianship to the wild fields of electric rock. No doubt Jimi Hendrix would have been happy to get on stage with these guys if he had been there.

New Frontiers

As the evening wore on I spent quite a lot of time outside the Club, partly to give my ears a rest, but mainly because I got into some immediately interesting conversations (there’s no small talk in Rilao!). The first was with Sound Designer Chanel Summers, who is a major player in the team that is developing the Rilao Project. We discussed the implications of disruptive technology on her particular branch of work as she and we all come to grips with the new methods of creative process, for which I’m going to coin the name Motion Imagery to incorporate all forms of visual media, whatever the audience or the creative input. The latest developments in Computer Technology audio and visual, all the new ways of harnessing the ever-expanding melting pot of creative energy and new possibilities require a new, encompassing word for what we have hitherto called Film or TV or Games or Transmedia or whatever.

As mentioned above, the word that is beginning to be used by Professor McDowell and his cohorts in world building is Synchromedia. Professor McDowell’s idea of this neologism is that it is a way to describe not only a broad range of potential narrative platforms, but their increasing power when considered synchronous elements of a global ‘narrative reality’.

I also talked with a young writer called Justin Barber who has written a whole series of books based on a fantasy world he and his pals (including his brother Trevor, one of the 5D Institute’s stalwart organisers) started developing back in 2010 (or probably its time of inception, no doubt was even earlier), and that he is hoping to develop into some sort of visual media presentation. Earlier articles here on the future of media delivery hopefully point the way towards this kind of creative process, building worlds and creating narratives to suit new methods of delivery.

This is where the Rilao Project operates, exploring these new frontiers and pushing them further, pushing them as far as they can.

Exploring Rilao

Early on the Saturday morning we assembled in the Queen’s Courtyard in front of the Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre for registration. This was an opportunity to begin meeting our fellow explorers. Coffee was provided and we sat around in the shade of the trees, barely out of the blazing heat of the morning sun. The day began hot and only got hotter. This is a metaphor but also the plain truth. It was my first time in L.A. and I loved every minute, not least the constant heat. Hot weather makes pleasant folks of us all. Being part of the Rilao Project only added to this effect. If I look back over my personal history of a geographically wide ranging and intellectually diverse career, this was one of the most satisfying weekends I can recall, combining as it did good fellowship, fine weather, and intense intellectual and creative endeavour. And some eclectic clothing.

Outside the Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre, USC

Photo by Derek Passmore
© 5D Institute’s Science of Fiction 2014

In our earlier conversation Professor McDowell had described to me the intention of the conference.

“The idea of The Science Of Fiction is, we do a massive world build, where we’re trying to test the limits of vast collaboration, and how then to extract rich narratives from such a huge number? So we have 240 people building a world in a day. And one tenth of those are children. We invite a full workshop group of children from 9 to 14, to take on exactly the same subjects, the same themes, and the same lines of enquiry as the adults, to develop their own narrative, but using their far more imaginative, far more liberated, far more fluid capabilities. We use them more or less as a litmus test against the adults, to see how much the adults were self-restraining or lacking in their imaginations.”

Trying to feel as unrestrained as possible, we were ushered through into the theatre itself, an enormous amphitheatre with plush red seats facing a wide stage and a full scale cinema silver screen. Despite the information already given to me and my talks with Professor McDowell, this was the first time that I truly grasped just how big this event was, the numbers of people invited to take part, the sheer scale of the organisation that had gone into it. Hats off to Casey Fenton and his team, as well as the team from the 5D Institute. The audience was an international crowd of students, university professors, artists across all forms of media, scientists working in a wide variety of disciplines, industrial engineers, game designers, programmers, urban planners, musicians and film makers.

Professor McDowell took the rostrum to give us a short diagetic introduction to The Island of Rilao and a briefing on the work of the day. He welcomed what he described as a “really incredible international turnout”, which indeed it was, with people from all over the world present. He told us that we who were assembled there were no longer an audience, we were to become World Builders, participants in the Rilao Project at a wholly engaged level. One precept of the Science of Fiction is that there is no audience and no stage, only players and collaborators. The point being, we are all experts in one aspect or another of a world, and in this level playing field total participation becomes achemic. I think perhaps we took this lightly as he said it, but by the end of the day we all bore the battle scars of the whole experience, exhausted and exhilarated as we were by then.

Professor McDowell told us about his first encounter with the mysterious island of Rilao. He and Ann Pendleton-Jullian were in Rio de Janeiro in the autumn of 2013, talking about the world building programme they were running, setting up the syllabus for their students at USC, for the 2014 semesters, and so forth, when “we started hearing rumours about an island in the middle of the Pacific. It was very obscure, we didn’t know much about it, We searched for it for a long time. In fact it is only in the last couple of weeks that we actually tracked down its real position.”

“It’s called Rilao. It’s somewhere just south of the Equator, more or less due south of Los Angeles, pretty much west of Rio.”

You can zoom in to see Rilao in detail, and out to see its location in relation to the South American continent.

Professor McDowell ended this introduction with a list of thank you’s to the team who organised the Festival and a formidable list of the many industry partners the 5D Institute has engaged to help them finance and create the Rilao Project and the work of the 5D Institute, a list far too long to reproduce here.

He was followed up to the rostrum by John Seely Brown, former director of the enormously influential Xerox Park, who is known familiarly as JSB (as a result of which, I must add, whenever I think of him my image conflates with that of some sort of protean earth-moving machine – presumably manufactured by the British company JCB– creating new cities and worlds).

Starting with a tribute to his “World Building Heroes” (pictured here)

JSB gave a Powerpoint presentation to guide our thinking as we approached the task we were about to attempt. He spoke as I have already quoted, about enacting the vision of a future world, and went on to discuss how we might use science fiction as the basis of this thinking, in particular, how we might socialise this new world.

He talked about what he described as Professor McDowell’s primary and oft repeated questions, “What if…” and “Why not?” What if we were to transform the street (he used the example of “the street of Jane Jacobs, apparently in a part of L.A. (I’m not familiar with the city so I don’t know where this might be)

To illustrate this, JSB showed us a video of a live street event created by a French organisation called Contrex, that experiments with a high level form of street theatre. This is only one example of their work. Others are available on youTube.

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The Anthropological Cabaret

We began with what was announced as The Anthropological Cabaret, which turned out to be a very amusing, and sometimes laugh out loud funny panel discussion, supposedly populated with returned Rilao explorers relating their exploits, their adventures, describing for us the land, and the risks, dangers, surprises and rewards of their experiences.

Josh McVeigh-Schultz, Pedro Curi, Lauren Fenton, Byron Laviolette and Trevor Haldenby, Bruno Setola, Matt Yurdana formed the panel, with Jen Stein and Julian Bleecker as their interviewers. We learned of their experiences on Rilao. They told us that they had gone there to help in the aftermath of the epidemic that had ravaged the islands for years, though, as we now know, the great majority of the population have survived it.

Bryon Laviolette and Trevor Haldenby, two very funny Canadians, did a lot of the talking, though the others putting in their responses, comments and stories. The discussion set the mood for the day, amusing but in its own way serious and revealing. Engaging would be the word. By the end, we who would form the teams for the hard work of discovery in the hours to follow were informed of the topography and political life of Rilao. This provided the background to the discussions to follow.

Discovering the Districts of Rilao

Rilao is an archipelago of islands enclosed by a one large reef-like island, with only one opening to the ocean in its length, called The Narrows. The inner cluster of Rilao is where the inhabitants have formed their society. This inner archipelago is divided into 9 Districts, each having a unique expression of the general culture, a kind of human Galapagos Islands in its evolutionary variegation.

Each of us new explorers was assigned to a District in the inner group of islands, with each District team comprising 25 or so members. I joined the District 9 group, a somewhat disturbing echo of that film about a society within the world but alien to it.

We made our way from the auditorium to the study block and down into the basement to find our specific room. It was a large rectangular, almost square room, with black and whiteboards erected, and a projection screen. There were a variety of craft materials set out on a table for our later use, and five circular tables set around the room beneath the bland and anonymous fluorescent lighting. and rituals to be followed, with detailed rules for what we were to do.

The group was then sub-divided into teams of four or five.

Hasta La Motion!