Artist: Ziyang Wu + Mark Ramos
Game Interaction & Interface & Networking Development: Jiahui Zhao
NFT Character Design: Ziqi Wang, Kexin Mao, Hanxiao Ge
Future_Forecast is a live simulation + collective world building project on the Metaverse. In the context of “Digital Earth”, “One Belt One Road Initiative” and the Philippines’ “Build Build Build Initiative”, Future_Forecast presents and predicts the evolution of cloud networked societies in the developing world by looking at the effects of growing Internet enabled networks and the ecological, geopolitical, and socio-cultural effects of a speculative future ISP and blockchain company in the Philippines.
The project is heavily inspired by Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack – On Software and Sovereignty, which is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Based on Benjamin Bratton’s Stack theory, the project builds a 6-layer structure (earth, cloud, city, address, interface, user) as an interactive platformer on the Metaverse.
Data Simulation
A series of data related to climate and environmental changes in the Philippines (temperature, sea level, CO2, forest and agricultural land area, etc.), network infrastructure development (data centers, network speed, digital services, cloud services, etc.), and users (number of broadband and mobile network subscribers, time spent online per capita) are connected to the metaverse space through APIs to trigger the changes of temperature, sea level, CO2, number of network address, population, and other effects in real time in the metaverse. This API array is constantly updating as new data becomes available.
Collective World Building
By completing a series of tasks related to each layer based on preliminary research, players can "build" and permanently change the landscape of the project upon successful completion of the missions. Focusing on a developing region (the Philippines), where the "superstack" platform has not yet been realized, as the object of research, we attempt to simulate a future between the virtual and the real, driven by both online and in-real-world data, and to explore the impact of network infrastructure construction and development on developing countries in the context of neo-colonialism, in order to promote thinking about new infrastructure and discursive urban planning for sustainable development.
LAN Workshops
Modeled after LAN (Local Area Network) Gaming parties organized by multiplayer gamers, we invite participants to gather with us in-person and under one roof to collectively experience and play future_forecast installed on a local network (a network of computers linked together but separate from the wider internet). Participants log onto the game platform simultaneously to play through the online experience together and engage in an active practice of real-time collective world-building on the metaverse. While we play, we discuss some of the issues present within the work: the stack model of planetary-scale computation, technology and the developing world, relationships between natural and human systems put forth by the game’s data API’s, game engines and speculations on the metaverse. Along with activating the work, we want to create a purposeful way for people to come together in-person around technological platforms, share an online experience together IRL, as well as encourage an active dialogue around the role of technology in our lives. We encourage participants to share screenshots and other documentation of the online world (metaverse) being built together in real-time.
