Branden Collins — The Young Never Sleep

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Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t have quite the sharpest memory. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to do too many things at once, or because I have too many passwords to keep up with, but it’s probably something simple like not getting enough sleep lol. Some of the memories that do stay with me though, are thsoe that come from my childhood. Specifically, those first few questions I asked, that seemed to stick with me through my adolescence on into adulthood. Why was the sky blue? How did we get here? What’s in space? Why weren’t there any dinosaurs in the Bible? It’s this deep rooted, inherent curiousity, instilled and nurtured in me through my childhood, by my mother, my teachers, relatives and peers alike, that has been the underlying theme of this practice since it’s inception in 2010. It’s also that childlike curiousty, the simple questions that lead to more tantilizing questions with every deeply nourishing answer, the fractal nature of why, from which the studio owes it’s namesake. The more I asked and explored colletively through the studio practice, the more I became enchanted by the ingenuity of humanity, and even more humbled and overwhelmed by the creativity of nature. In spite of legacies of oppression, disenfranchisement, systems of violence that through generations sought to encage me and those like me, it’s my love for understanding through science, art and nature that kept me grounded to my core self. Through natures reflections, I saw an open window to infinite possibility, a vision of another world.

I’m currently working with an interdiscplinary network of creative technologists, new media artists, researchers and visionaries to imagine new possibilities and create new worlds through a new platform called YOO.Gen.

YOO.Gen is a virtual playground made to develop a fully-realized story world generator based on an infrastructural famework called Communion and en ever-evolving theory of integrated information, Technoculture.