Antifluffy and The Futureplaces Impromptu All-Star Orchestra at Maus Hábitos, Porto, on November 2, 2013. Photo by Luis Barbosa for Future Places on Facebook (used with permission). I was surprised to see remnants of magnetic tape on people's hair and clothing at the closing session of Future Places, a digital media festival in Porto, Portugal, reinvented this year as “media lab for citizenship”. Since 2008, the annual event has been hosted by the University of Porto in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin under a program called Collaboratory for Emerging Technologies. Scholars, artists, musicians, scientists and technologists came together from October 28 to November 2, 2013 for a rich program that included a series of workshops, debates and performances, as well as a doctoral symposium on digital media. The dark-tape character among the participants who caught my attention was Antifluffy, whose bio simply read “our glorious mascot”. I had the chance to “meet” this fictional character (created by art director and co-curator Heitor Alvelos) at the end of the show, and he was exhausted. Antifluffy had just wrapped his audience in VHS tape during an exercise on ‘post-digital’ immediatism. The performance explored the idea that part of our past is recorded in analog form. The metaphor of the magnetic tape was also an invitation to consider magnetism between human beings. Can wrapping strangers in tape be a “visible rendition of human connections”? In a post-digital era, Antifluffy believes so. Building on the concept of immediatism coined by insurrectionist philosopher Hakim Bey in a manifesto from 1994, Antifluffy invites us to partake in “non-mediated experiences” (such as a writing a letter by hand) because it's humanly and psychologically important to build bridges, encounter strangers, and explore new ground. “The very idea that the future is digital is somehow dissipating. We have entered the post-digital [era] to an extent that there isn't even a possible separation anymore,” says Antifluffy. “Gadgets have entrenched themselves in our lives to an extent that it doesn't even make sense to think of them as being in their own space. They have already taken root in our daily lives.” Interview with Antifluffy Global Voices (GV): Who are you, Antifluffy? Who is Antifluffy? “Antifluffy contemplates a sea of ​​winter, a cold bleak landscape, a metaphor for contemporaneity, for the utopia that crumbled…” Concept: Heitor Alvelos. Poster for Future Places by Manufactura Independente. Antifluffy (AF): I am a mascot of a media lab in Porto. I am an icon, because I have an image and a catchy name. And I am an idea about how the world can be better a place. GV: Do you mean the real world or the digital world? As Antifluffy I don't really make a distinction, it's all connected. Essentially what I try to convey is the thought that there is nothing really fundamentally different from new media if we don't consider its repercussions on the existential level. There is a kind of underlying determinism about media – and even what people call post-media – that is this road to go towards the future without actually considering what it is doing to us and what kind of choices we really have. GV: Do you choose to be on social media? Yes, of course, I should say that I have many Facebook accounts and many Twitter accounts in the sense that being an idea, I am essentially something that is in everyone's brains. Antifluffy is a way of describing a quality that every human being has that is called obliquity. It's the capacity that every human being has, intrinsically, to think outside-the-box, to innovate, to not just go with the flow, to not just let themselves be seduced by the mirror of everyday gadgets right away. Ultimately Antifluffy is the belief that people can get a better deal out of what media is offering them. One thing that strikes me is to realize that we all have incredibly powerful tools at our disposal right now and yet it seems that rather than working in our favor they are acting against us, making us more anxious, more deterministic, more alienated. Where is the healing aspect of new media? I haven't quite figured it out yet and I think we have a duty to find it and nurture it. Of course I am making a huge generalization, there are people doing something fundamentally right, but they are the exception rather than the rule… Participant of the citizen lab “We are the fluff” wrapped in magnetic tape. Photo by Luís Barbosa for Future Places (used with permission) GV: Who is the “We” of the “We are the fluff” performance that has just happened When I say “we” I mean ‘We human beings’, ‘We creatures that happen to be alive in this moment’.