“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators…”
This was William Gibson, writing in the Sci-Fi Novel Neuromancer, and coining the first use of the term cyberspace in 1984. Snowcrash was released in 1992. That same year, a movie was released that anyone in the 1990s will remember: Lawnmower Man.
The movie explored a technology that at the time, seemed on the horizon: Virtual Reality. Today we’re delighted to be talking with Brett Leonard, Director of Lawnmower Man (1992) and movies such as Virtuosity (1995), on what in hindsight was a historic time in Hollywood, as well as Silicon Valley.
Thirty years since Lawnmower first aired, I asked Brett how the metaverse of our own time mirrors the Sci-Fi stories I grew up with as a kid.
Leonard describes arriving in Santa Cruz rather than central LA, and eventually finding himself in a scene that included the likes of Jobs, Wozniak and perhaps most compellingly, Jaron Lanier - a founding individual in the field of Virtual Reality.
Thirty years since Lawnmower first aired, I asked Brett how the metaverse of our own time mirrors the Sci-Fi stories I grew up with as a kid. Will AI creator tools allow billions to summon their own simulated realities? How will artists imagine and construct what Brett calls “storyworlds” using technologies that are incredibly advanced, but also really human - and fallible.
