We are all aliens

Folkert Gorter aka Superfamous.com has left Amsterdam half a year ago to work on a unique multimedia project in Los Angeles “that will offer people a new way of thinking” and “that will let them take part in the evolutionary process of mankind”. The sneakpeak he offers me proves his he may just keep his promise! The thirty year old designer (formgiver in the case of Folkie - translator) has web-cred, since he started, together with Jason Kristofer, the website Newstoday.com. This elegant portal for the online designcommunity attracts roughly 11 million pageviews per month. Gorter’s new project is Spacecollective.org. Yet still hidden behind password protection, the launchdate is projected for 2007. De site will be a “non-profit, cross media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward-thinking terrestrials”. Buzzword bingo!

In webisodes of three minutes each - non-linear minutes even, in which the focus jumps from moving image to streaming typography and short facts that will offer a psychedelic perspective in just a blink of an eye - Folkert creates, together with partners René Daalder (Bright issue 06) and Aaron Ohlman, a new version of the gold-anodized plaque that was compiled by Carl Sagan for NASA as a representation for human kind. The plaque (Bright issue 02) was shot into space aboard the Voyager, today still flying with a velocity of 1 million miles a day, looking for an exchange with extraterrestrial intelligence. From this analog plaque, named Murmurs of Earth, Spacecollective will create their own variation, this time allowing everybody to participate, without the censorship such as the brushing away of the male and female genitals at the time. Each member will get its own spacecapsule, for which the member can create messages that will be beamed to the stars monthly. This way everyone can, to quote the creators, “create its own digital immortality”.

SpaceCollective will be a trilogy. Apart from the website a reality-tv series is in the pipeline, in which groups of students, grocery-store employees or ex-astronauts will work on a capsule for a period of time; and a speculative Sci-Fi documentary about the state of the future of mankind. What is striking about the message is the notion that “the most hopeful sign of intelligent life on earth is the rise of the internet”. The creators look upon each human being as a neurone and the Net offers the synapses that will enable us to make connections. A new collective brain can bring us to the next level of human evolution, a development that is perceptibly increasing acceleration, and that will eventually, around 2060, lead us to the coming Technological Singularity. Meanwhile Gorter is all set. He thinks of himself as a testpilot who tests concepts to ultimately return them to improve the condition of mankind.

http://spacecollective.org

By Adam Eeuwens, Los Angeles
for Bright Magazine, Issue 10.

http://spacecollective.org/preview/

http://www.superfamous.com/empire/