Kevin Slavin:
There’s not a direct line. But they both derive from some of the things that led to Area/Code. A couple of examples: Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, Geocaching was just beginning, and a couple of years later, Katie Salen, Nick Fortugno and Frank Lantz did the Big Urban Game. Around that time, maybe 2002, the anti-war demonstrations were happening, and I watched a bunch of protesters shut down Broadway at Prince street — by basically holding hands across Broadway. I was thinking: “This is not going to end well.” As I watched, though, there was this moment when the protesters looked at each other and suddenly dropped hands, shed a layer of clothing, and melted into the crowd. I realized they all had earpieces, and they were plugged into a grid that was better than the NYPD’s. Two minutes later, the police arrived, but it was already long over.When we started Area/Code in 2004, it was “software for cities,” and we were interested in entertainment software. We were working through certain curiosities about how, on the one hand, these new technologies affect how individuals interact with the world, and then on the other hand, how these larger collective organisms called cities are also reshaping themselves around software. And in a long indirect way, those two questions led to these two talks.