SKYTEMPLE SPACE DIVISION

Until now, Skytemple Space Division has been kept top secret. Skytemple staff have been legally bound to nondisclosure agreements. We have lived the last year in the shadows while secretly preparing to lead the way into the final frontier for web design companies.

Finally, our story can be told.

All the way back in 2011  a strange discussion erupted at one of our weekly meetings concerning the news of actor Ashton Kutcher’s recent purchase of a $200,000 ticket aboard one of Virgin Galactic’s new sub-orbital space ships.

Richard Branson, the billionaire head of the Virgin Group claims to have already sold 500 tickets aboard Virgin Galactic’s as-yet launched sub-orbital space fleet.

This got us wondering: why doesn’t Skytemple have a Galactic Space Fleet? We couldn’t come up with an answer.

So after months of soul-searching, we started construction on our proposed Orbiting Sky Temple and our fleet of Skytemple Space Cruisers.

It is thanks to these efforts that we are able to offer our celebrated services in a whole new way.

Websites, in SPACE!

The orbiting Sky Temple hosts three shuttle docks and an impressive array of anti-drone space missiles. Inside its fifty-thousand square foot interior, it boasts impressive living quarters including 70 bathrooms, a full space tennis court, a zero g sauna, and a staff of over three hundred robots. It is 4G and Space Wi-Fi integrated.

Each of the six Skytemple Space Cruisers is staffed by a crew of seven pilots, three engineers, and four attendants. In-flight meals are prepared by master space-chefs and include ‘Astronaut’ versions of all your favorite foods. Freeze-dried ice cream, freeze-dried open faced portable mushroom paninis and freeze-dried foie gras are just a sampling of the vast menu.

I know what you’re wondering. Will Skytemple still make great websites and offer expert consultation for all of my marketing needs? Of course. We will simply be doing it from our gigantic orbiting Sky Temple from now on.

Check back often for future news and information about how you can apply to live in the orbiting Sky Temple!

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Ancient Mayan calendars prophesy that the world will end December 21, 2012. Although the end of the world has been a long time coming, the topic is more infamous now than ever before. You might want to set up your underground shelter and make some alliance decisions for the Zombie Apocalypse. Everyone’s doing it.

But the folks behind Doomsday Faire 2012 aren’t just talking about the end of the world, they aim to bring The End to Connecticut  this summer.

Every culture and faith has their own stories of what it will be like. Some predict the dead will rise from their graves, fire and brimstone will fall from the sky and God himself will appear to bring final judgement during mankind’s final hours. More modern strains of endgame prophesies predict rogue planets, geomagnetic upheaval or flash pandemics turning man against man in an often-burning and shelled out post-apocalyptic arena. Scientists and political leaders have been quick to point out the flaws in these predictions, as well as to reassure the public that Zombies, Aliens and Demons, are, of course, not real.

But what if they were wrong? What if predictions of the end of the world started to come true? Doomsday Faire will be a grand smashup of apocalyptic scenarios. Imagine Zombies roaming a countryside alongside aliens and human survivors, all on a landscape ravaged by celestial cataclysm.

“There are no stores, no malls, no Judicial system, few roads, limited communication, but amongst the utter destruction humanity survived.”

Visitors will wander wartorn streets of a post-apocalyptic world and experience firsthand “what it would be like to celebrate survival in a world full of zombies, aliens, strong and crafty human survivors all dealing with the harsh realities of the end of the world, and making the best of what they have.”

For more information and how to be a part of the Doomsday Faire, check out the site below or “Like” Doomsday Faire on Facebook for news.

DOOMSDAY FAIRE

DOOMSDAY FAIRE ON FACEBOOK

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Longtime resident of New Britain — Dr. Bruce T Fletcher — has spent years bringing dental care to those who would otherwise never have it and works with Lexington Dental to “inspire our friends to restore their teeth, gums, mouth and smile to optimal and maintainable health, comfort, function and beauty”.

With missionary work in Honduras, Bolivia and Equador, Dr. Fletcher has shown time and time again his dedication to equal access dental care. He is currently a member of the New Britain Oral Health Collaborative, which works to provide dental services to underprivileged youth in New Britain, a member of the Pierrre Fauchard International Dental Honor Society as well as a participate in the Mentor Program at the UConn School of Dental Medicine.

At his practice, Lexington Dental Associates, Dr. Fletcher emphasizes thoroughness. Located at 49 Lexington Street, it is all-ages, and also all-encompassing.

“Our interest lies not in “patchwork” or “emergency only” dentistry, but in advanced comprehensive care. We strive for results that feel good, look good and work well. This office refers as needed to specialists for some root canal treatments, surgical periodontal care, orthodontics, certain extractions and implant placement.”

In-house oral conscious sedation is offered for the more apprehensive patients, and many smile-enhancing treatments (such as bonding, crowns, natural-looking fillings, Zoom! two-hour whitening, and Smile Vision) are available.

You can learn more at their website here: Lexington Dental Associates.

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Augmented Reality, or computer mediated reality, is already all around us. Although we may not be able to buy The Terminator’s glasses or Jordy LaForge’s ocular implants, the world of fully immersive computer mediated experiences that blend the real world and the digital are not far off.

At a recent brainstorming session, we talked about the promises and pitfalls of this emerging technology as well as some of our own ideas on the possibilities of Augmented Reality. To give some focus to our vision, we each created cards describing the features that could come out of this emerging technology.

Check out the photos on Facebook

A Little History

Augmented Reality could be said to have it’s roots in a famously abandoned technology of the early computer revolution, Virtual Reality. Speculators ranging from Timothy Leary to William Gibson had dreams of building fully immersive 3d virtual worlds. Suits encased the user literally in bulky helmets and gloves, sometimes full body suits – and at their most extreme, buckled harnesses attached to human sized centrifugal hoops designed to free the user from the bounds of gravity. Unfortunately the dream exceeded the technology of the time. Virtual Reality never took off in large part because computers able to handle the amount of raw data needed to continuously render convincing interactive 3d worlds simply was too expensive and cumbersome for the average consumer.

Augmented Reality became a kind of middle ground. A staging area where the ideas and techniques of a virtual interactive 3d world could be tested by mixing them with real world objects and locations. On one end, exhaustive and exacting GPS coordinating became possible enabling geolocation accuracy down to a few feet and closing every day.

The real world was mapped and digested into numbers and fed into computers all over the world, creating a exhaustive, immense, and self-perpetuating mosaic of a world more detailed than the most thorough fantasy realm. The advance of personal portable computers in the form of PDAs and Smart phones has given rise to an already existing unseen virtual world growing up all around us. Best of all this virtual world is hosted in an ever expanding wireless web; cloud computing is slowly but surely breaking down the limitations of storage capacity and information access.

On the other hand, immersive multiplayer virtual worlds have grown both in popularity and sophistication. Two examples being the ever prevalent World of Warcraft (just one of many online communities who’s virtual economic system has grown so large and complex that it has given rise to cottage industries of ‘gold farmers’ who buy and trade virtual items for real world currency) and the recently released Skyrim, which has dazzled audiences and critics with it’s level of immersion and sophistication. In the last few years however, each of these splintered fields has been increasingly linked to create powerful applications which overlay the virtual world onto the physical.

The Writing On The Wall

One of the most familiar uses of Augmented Reality is in sports. Many people are familiar with the yellow ‘first down’ line in Football which appears to actually be painted on the field but is really generated by computer in real time, but many other sports use the technology to display advertising on empty playing field walls.

Applications on Android and iPhones can supply a kind of computer-mediated vision of the world. Some display simple things such as maps and information about surrounding points – all with the aid of location-identifying GPS coordinators, while others directly overlay the position of the planetary bodies, stars, and satellites, or real-time special effects such as laser blasts and explosions. While these early uses of Augmented reality may seem, at their best, like simple expansions on existing technologies, and at their worst gimmicky novelties, AR has the very real potential to change everything about how humans interact with the world. From advertising to architecture there is nothing off limits to AR.

As computers creep from the desk, to our pockets, weaving into our very clothes and perhaps some day our flesh, the question has  become not when, but how computers will mediate our lives. Will AR be used to supplant reality with a “better” version, to cover walls with virtual ads and fantastic vistas, or will it be used to enhance reality, to visualize once invisible depth and dimension to our the Real World User Experience?

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“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Everyday Magic

Many people swear by certain rituals to their art, certain music they have to listen to in order to create, certain times of day they have to work, or even certain shoes they have to wear. Some artists, however, know the mere act of art itself  as a kind of ritual; a way for each of us to rent the fabric of the ordinary and transform our everyday life.

Since the dawn of humankind, art has served to heighten the experience of everything it touches from our most holy rituals to our most mundane of tasks. From the ancient shamanistic cave paintings on the walls of our ancestral homes, intended to inject magical visages to prehistoric gatherings, to the war paint of celtic tribes to the ceremonial feathers adorning Native American warriors, art has been used for countless centuries to transform the world – to bridge the gap between the physical realm and the realm of ideas

Holidays are the best place to look for the ways the ritual of art transforms our world. Christmas finds us adorning sprawling living room totems in hopes of a joyful season. Without the baubles and decorations, the cards and wreaths hung from our walls each December, Christmas would lose much of it’s essence. Art as ritual creates the season. Halloween allows us to escape even ourselves for one night, by literally transforming ourselves with masks and garments which normally exist only in our individual or collected imaginations in the form of costumed heroes and villains from myth, legend, and more modern media.

Through The Looking Glass

One local artist has been exploring these very themes all her life. Megan LaBonte – who many Valley residents may already know as, “The Hoola-Hoop Girl,” a moniker Ms LaBonte picked up in the early aughts for her public impromptu Hoola-Hoop parties on the steps of the First Congressional on Main, has spent the last decade exploring the boundaries between art and life, most notably with her installation pieces placed in Northampton shop windows in which she turned blank white mainline heads into exquisitely detailed fantastical faces. This last year however, Ms LaBonte took the plunge, emerging her world in an everyday ritual to produce images of worlds which exist right on top of our own.

The 366 Program asks artist to take a picture of themselves every day for a year (in this case a leap year hence the 366). This seemingly simple task has blossomed into a treasure trove of opportunities for Ms LaBonte to explore reoccurring themes such as nature and the woods, femininity and sexuality to name just a few. Each day she uses her camera to become a kind of portal, allowing her each day a moment to transcend the every day. One day may find her transformed with brightly colored scales rippling across her face, while another a satyr deep in a green wood complete with horns and elven ears.

In the following podcast interview with Megan LaBonte, I discuss her ongoing 366 project, her past work and touch on some of the ideas discussed above.

Megan LaBonte-interview by Skytemple

View more of Ms LaBonte’s work at her online gallery here.

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