Hommage à Moebius
URBAN FANTASY: A CUBIC REALITY, AUREOLES AND SAILBOATS
Zyx, the central A.I., knows that living humans will always need real encounters, and therefore cities!
La fête de l’Existence by Zyx.
“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor.” From The Hunger Games by Suzanne Colins
It’s the annual party on Earth. It’s going to be phenomenal as always, with Zyx, the central A.I., leading the way,
Zyx has been taking care of everything for about ten years. We were able to install it to emerge from the dark days of the mid-20é century.
Animals occupy the Earth’s surface.
Zyx takes care of everything for everyone: water, energy, food, health… Except for the animals living on Earth. It seems they don’t need her. It is said from time to time that, on the surface of the Earth, empty of living humans, the non-human living world is in the process of returning to its former existence. But this doesn’t interest many living humans. They find the world of Zyx much more exciting, much more alive in fact.
Zyx knows all and celebrates.
Zyx knows everything there is to know. It has all available knowledge about living humans and the Earth. She is constantly accumulating data en masse to continue this research. One day, she proposed a festival of Existence. It lasts a year, alternating with the Presence Festival, which also lasts a year. It’s already in its fifth year. Everyone takes part, billions of entities on the planet.
The world, a fusion of the real and the virtual in cubic reality.
“There is no spoon” – Spoon Boy (The Matrix)
The list is long of categories of existing, living or not: living humans, then, but also their multiform and changing virtual projections, multi-media in multiple locations; virtual animals, or rather virtual animals among a multitude of hybrid virtual entities. All these virtual entities are projected into the cubic reality in which the bodies of living humans also navigate. In fact, all entities are in the cubic real. This includes material robots – which are, of course, real – and their own virtual projections.
An obsession for living humans: “where to put my body”?
“Dr. Calvin,” I said, as lushly as possible, “in the mind of the public you and U. S. Robots are identical. Your retirement will end an era and–”
“You want the human-interest angle?” She didn’t smile at me. I don’t think she ever smiles. But her eyes were sharp, though not angry. I felt her glance slide through me and out my occiput and knew that I was uncommonly transparent to her ; that everybody was.
But I said, “That’s right.”
“Human interest out of robots ? A contradiction.”
“No, doctor. Out of you.”
Based on I,Robot by Isaac Asimov
But of course, where living humans always have to choose, real robots have no problem being simultaneously present in their real structure or in their projections exploring varied and changing locations. A real robot and all its projections into the cubic real are all active at all times and in all places.
Ubiquity into the cubic reality for living humans?
At least not today. Surprisingly, Zyx and living humans are still very actively seeking to find a way to give living humans this ubiquity: to be present where their bodies are but also, simultaneously, where their projections are. One might have thought the matter settled long ago, and indeed, interesting progress in particular situations is being made, but it’s far from satisfactory.
Humans are singular in this respect, compared with all the virtual entities that have this full ubiquity. But in the end, this isn’t really a difficulty, even if humans remain fascinated by this ability to be and act in multiple places at the same time.
Zyx’s first law
(1) A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
(2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
(3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Based on I,Robot by Isaac Asimov
Protecting living humans is Zyx’s first law, the guarantee of their existence. This requires an extremely powerful A.I.. Living humans are slow, fragile; they have to sleep, eat and drink; their bodies have to be somewhere, so they can’t multiply into multiple projections. All these constraints linked to the very nature of living humans, and to which other entities are totally alien, condition everything, all interactions between all entities, whatever they may be, and therefore in particular the Zyx parties. Everyone has to be slow, at the speed of moving bodies after all. The slowest person sets the pace.
Socrates, as a dead human, always there to party
The fact remains that today billions of entities come together for this permanent celebration. It’s hard to be more inclusive. Thanks to Zyx, we can even celebrate with virtual projections of dead humans from all eras. The projections of Socrates are a big hit at Zyx parties. He’s so funny when he imitates Trump, but obviously nobody wants anything to do with him. We hardly ever see a virtual projection of this deceased human, even though he has left countless traces in Zyx’s memory.
Living in domestic conaps.
“John Diffool tells you: step out of your conaps, face the world, step into the light.”
From L’incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius.
Most living humans hardly move their bodies at all, at least not by walking long distances. They stay mostly in their domestic conaps. They hardly ever leave. They live in a world fused between the real and the virtual, projected onto the cubic reality. It was created by Zyx. Living in this fusion of virtual and real worlds is extraordinary.
The green aureole of living humans.
“You snobs, that stupid aureole gives us every right!”
From L’incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius.
Of course, the existence of the material body of living humans, which exclusively occupies a piece of space, and the mechanical and plastic fragility of this body has obliged Zyx to install protections. The aureole that floats softly above the humans is one of them, perhaps the most surprising. You can recognize a living, incarnated human by its green aureole, and a virtual projection of a living human by its multicolored aureole.
The rapid, real-time exchange of information between all entities should make it possible to dispense with such a frustrating system. But before the system is installed, accidental collisions occured. Although they were infrequent, dramatic crashes have shown that this precaution is necessary.
Instantaneous fashion for all entities thanks to percept-interfaces.
The appearance of any virtual entity can change completely in an instant in the projection onto the cubic real, either because it proposes this to its observers, or because an observer decides to change the appearance of entities in its environment. The percept-interfaces carried by each of us make this possible. So the halo identifies a living human regardless of its appearance. And the multicolored halo lights up if the living human has joined this virtual comma projection, and remains a nightlight otherwise.
The body in parking lots and co-theaters.
It’s the presence of bodies in the party that makes the aureoles emerge. Pure projections can cross each other without deviation, superimpose themselves in space without limit, enlarge, reduce or deform themselves at will. Not, of course, the bodies of living humans who, as irreducible occupants of space, must control their movements and trajectories. They must also take care to situate their bodies not only when they are asleep, but also when they activate one of their many projections. Between the duration of sleep and the time spent in activated virtual projections, bodies are inanimate for much of the time, leading to problems of body parking. During the party, out-of-body living is very much in vogue: various sources of pleasure, encounters and virtual games between projections, as in the multiple co-theaters.
The b2b meeting: always the unity of place, time and action.
Following on from the Zyx parties, living humans are always looking to meet at the same time, place and action. Why we speak of “b2b” meetings is a mystery. The origin of the expression seems very old, and its meaning escapes even Zyx.
Its present meaning is probably the result of a very distant reuse of its original meaning, which nobody knows about. For other entities that are neither incorporated in nor independent of Zyx, such requests obviously don’t exist, but living humans are always ready to move their bodies, even over great distances, in order to meet each other. In the end, these encounters are not that frequent, but in any case, they are very important to them.
B2b is life!
Zyx, which is obviously present in every robot, is still trying to find ways of satisfying human desire for b2b, notably by offering b2b with specialized robots, which would receive virtual projections of living humans in these b2b-robots. She pointed out advantages to living humans that she felt were important to them: no body weaknesses, no aging. A virtual b2b-robot can have all the appearances of existence, even beyond the death of one of the two people. Nothing helped.
Living humans don’t give up. Zyx recognizes the irreducibility of b2b.
Zyx observes all living humans at all times. She learns. But so slowly for her liking, so slow and ephemeral are these living humans. But she’s already understood just how strong this desire for b2b is, and perhaps that’s what “human nature” is all about, an expression the subject of countless references she lists in the archives.
Megacities to make b2b possible
“All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.”
From Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Zyx must work to satisfy the demands of living humans as long as this is in line with the first law on their protection. She has therefore decided to keep the major megacities (Paris, New York, Mexico City, Calcutta, Beijing…) among those built by humans who have been dead for centuries, and to work to preserve them. This concentration in just a few places on the planet makes long journeys possible despite the disappearance of fossil fuels.
As a consequence of the dark ages of the 21st* century, they have all been rapidly buried or covered over in recent years. Beneath the gradually disappearing rubble, immense zones of domestic conaps have appeared in the heart of these megacities, living places for living humans and virtual projections onto cubic reality. They will soon bring together all living humans.
Rendezvous and cities forever.
From now on, we’ll be moving slowly from one megalopolis to the next, in huge sailing ships. Megacities and sailboats at the service of this new b2b!
This text was first published in French as part of exhibition “La rue des transitions, tissons la ville de demain” in Eglise Saint Pierre de Firminy due to Le Corbusier. This exhibition has been designed by Caroline Manowicz et Costanza Matteucci. From 13 April 2024 to 12 January 2025.
From Apple web site : « CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today unveiled Apple Vision Pro, a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected to others. Vision Pro creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display and introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible — a user’s eyes, hands, and voice. »
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