In Spring 2010, Trinity University hosted five guest speakers as part of the Lennox Seminar "Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries." Each one of the Lennox speakers was invited to speak because they are committed to demystifying technology and empowering the human imagination.

If you missed the lecture series, you can view video clips of the Lennox talks via this site. You can also view (or download) a full-color print anthology linked to the lecture series. The book includes student writings, stories and articles written by our guest speakers, creative projects (e.g., stories, photographs, performance art, documentaries, and machinima animations) and a treasure trove of related works from the creative commons.

Steven Shaviro, the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, was the first guest. Described as "one of our most exciting and innovative cultural theorists," Shaviro may be best known for his books Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism and Connected: Or What It Means to Live in the Network Society. In these playful, poetic works, Shaviro demonstrates that seemingly innocuous cultural texts–from Disney robots and comic books to video games and B-movies–have much to teach us about the human (and post-human) condition in this new century.

Shaviro delivered a compelling public lecture titled "Some years from this exact moment: Neveldin/Taylor's Gamer and the control society." He also met separately with the Lennox seminar students and shared his most recent research on how converging communication technologies are transforming cinema, television, and music videos.

A few weeks later, Annalee Newitz arrived on the Trinity University campus. Editor-in-chief of the science fiction blog io9, her work has been published in Popular Science, The Believer, New Scientist, Wired Magazine, and Wall Street Journal. She is a fellow-traveler in the emerging biopunk movement who argues passionately on behalf of open-sourced genomic databases. She is also the coeditor of the anthology She's Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff, a "hopeful book that looks forward to the day when women will invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, and run the government."

In her public lecture "Curse of the meatsack: Biohacking, immortality and science fiction," Newitz posed compelling questions to transhumanists who hope to use advanced medical techniques to achieve immortal life. She developed these ideas further in a private meeting with the Lennox seminar students and also discussed ways that emerging technologies are transforming the magazine and publishing industries.

The next visitor was R.U. Sirius. Currently editor-in-chief of the transhumanist magazine h+, Sirius was widely known in the early 1990s as editor-in-chief of the popular "cyberpunk" magazine Mondo 2000. This publication was preceded by two other magazines that covered similar themes: High Frontiers and Reality Hackers. In fact, the title of this lecture series is an intentional tribute to his work.

Additionally, Sirius (whose real name is Ken Goffman) has authored or co-authored 11 books, including Everybody Must Get Stoned, Cyberpunk Handbook, True Mutations and Design For Dying with psychedelic legend Timothy Leary. In 2000, Sirius ran a write-in campaign for president of the United States for the Revolution Party, an organization that offered a platform combining political left and libertarian themes.

In his public lecture "Hijack the Singularity or why the future must be post-scarcity or not at all," Sirius argued that imminent technological advances will lead to massive economic disruption because our needs will be satisfied by technology rather than human labor. He called on the audience to view such developments as a wonderful opportunity to engage in more interesting and valuable creative activities. "Set yourself free," he concluded. "Hijack the Singularity."

Freedom was also a key concern for our fourth guest: legendary game designer Richard Bartle. Currently a lecturer at Essex University, Bartle co-authored the world's first virtual world as a college undergraduate in 1978. A former university lecturer in artificial intelligence, he is an influential writer on all aspects of virtual world design and development. As an independent consultant, he has worked with almost every major online gaming company in the U.K. and the U.S. over the past 20 years, transforming an undergraduate research project into a multi-billion dollar industry. His book Designing Virtual Worlds is widely viewed as a "tour de force of virtual world design."

In his public lecture "Is the virtual too unrealistic? Crying over non-spilled milk," Bartle took aim at the lack of "realisticness" in contemporary virtual worlds and called for the creation of open-ended virtual worlds that permit the same sort of unexpected, emergent behaviors that characterized the first text-based MUDs. He reminded the audience that, when he designed the first virtual world, his goal was to create a place where players could be and become who they really are.

Last but not least, our fifth guest was Moscow-born author Ekaterina Sedia. Sedia's third novel, The Alchemy of Stone, has been hailed as one the best science fiction novels of the previous decade. Her next work, The House of Discarded Dreams, is expected in July 2010.

Sedia's prose has been described as haunting and magical, and reviewers praise Sedia's knack for "leaving readers to reach their own conclusions about the proper balance of tradition and progress and what it means to be alive." She is an award-winning editor of the Paper Cities anthology; her next anthology, Running with the Pack, will be released in May 2010. In addition to writing, she teaches genetics, botany and plant ecology at a state liberal arts college in New Jersey.

In a fascinating public lecture titled "genetic modification and copyright," Sedia examined ways in which a legal framework designed to protect the intellectual property rights of creators is now being used by multinational corporations to patent sequences of DNA. Sedia noted that, though these laws were originally intended to promote creative and scientific expression, they have ended up doing the exact opposite.

All five of these guest speakers were brought to campus with the generous support of the Martha, David, and Bagby Lennox Foundation. The ability to interact with these leading thinkers was a wonderful opportunity for Trinity students and professors, as well as for the many community members who attended the public lectures.