Well, on this page you can find a very detailed and extensive guide on the "Alternate Reality Game" METACORTEX. Haven't read much until now, but the page seems to contain tons of information that could answer a few of our questions ... have a nice time by reading! ;o)

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12th of December from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Vortragssaal des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde, Maximiliansstr. 42 (Munich) The working group "Anthropology & Tourism" has arranged an interdisciplinary conference called "Anthropology and its search for a place in the tourism discussion" which will take place the 12th of December 2003 at the Museum of Anthropology in Munich. Topics range from "An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism Culture", "Tourism and Sustainability", "Community Based Tourism and Minorities", "The Concept of Participation in Tourism-Projects" to "The German Road of Fairy-Tales". The conference seeks to cultivate an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, private/public sectors, and policy-makers interested in the practice and theory of tourism. The working group invites anyone interested to join the conference. For more information see the schedule and invitation Tagung (application/msword, 834 KB) or contact us at AKEthnologie-Tourismus@gmx.de.

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With a quick glance at www.altavista.de i found out, that the MetaCortex could be some kind of an "online based adventure or puzzle inspired by ". Participants takeing part in that game are called "detectives" and together they form a community on the internet. They follow hints spread all over the net and solve riddles which are part a so called "case". The "MetaCortex" (i keep writing meatcortex :p) is one of those cases. Unfortunatelly i don't have time to look deeper right now, but if you guys want to find out more, check out their headquater. Maybe you can find someone on their irc-channel to talk to, i had bad luck this morning, just found quiet idlers ...

Interesting aspect of this "homework on fieldwork" is, that by riddeling out, what's behind the "MetaCortex", we "somehow" do exactly the same thing, as the people do involved in the MetaCortex! What a coincident Mister ProfessOr ;-)

Oh well, good hunt, im looking forward on what you guys will find out =) bye

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I am sorry that we had some technical problems here: Your posts didn't appear in the topic. The failure was that the admins of antville changed to a newer version of this software, and the inside-html name of the "save" button was changed, so I had to correct that also in our templates.

Now everything should work fine. So keep on posting!

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International conference: Colonial and postcolonial constructions of Africa and Blacks in German popular culture. Königswinter near Bonn October 13-17, 2004. Call for Papers: "Possible topics include, but are not limited to: film, music, pictoral arts, literature, comics, postcards, anthropological and other museums, advertising, materials of everyday life, food, toys, missions, circus and ethnological show business, sports, journalism and the media, sexuality, sexisms, gender construction, mapping the African body, violence, "blackness"/"whiteness". The influence of: philosophy, physical and cultural anthropology, "Rassenlehre", historiography, politics. The impact from abroad: USA, Africa, European countries. Further suggestions are welcome. We also plan to set up round table and/or panel discussions. Conference languages will be German and English. Registration fee will be EUR 30,- (EUR 15,- for students). Please share this information with interested colleagues and students at your institution. Registration deadline will be January 15, 2004. Only those who register will receive subsequent mail with more information." For more information write an e-mail to KopfWelten e.V. or to Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, both at the Institut für Afrikanistik of Cologne University, Germany or directly download the registration form as a .pdf.

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What's a Metacortex/Metacortech? There is a very nice explaination and introduction to this topic, written by Omnie, Member of the Matrixfans.net Forum:

Metacortex press release Hello! For those of you who have no idea what it is we're doing here, I decided to provide a little introduction. Basically, the Metacortex website was found as a sponsored google link by Statik here on MFN some months back. At that point, it was just a flash countdown to October 1st. Hidden in the flash file were six links to random Matrix fansites, confirming that there was indeed a connection to the Matrix movies.

In the days leading up to October 1st, lidox on TLFC discovered that Underscore Hosting, the site that supposedly hosted Metacortex, was actually fake. Take a look around that site and you'll see why. Interest started rising at that point.

On October 1st, midnight Pacific time, the site was updated to what it looks like today. The company is fake, its address and town are nonexistant...it's part of a widespread internet game that's known as an ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming). There are puzzles, clues, and a continuing storyline centered around Beth McConnell, the main protagonist who apparently is starting to suspect that the world around her isn't quite what it seems to be. Well, I'll let some links take over at this point. Here are some guides that have the info that we've collected so far:

ourworld.cs.com

www.cs.uiowa.edu www.metacortex-conspiracy.de.vu

Some more forums where this game is being investigated:

Unforum (an ARG site) - all of the active puzzle-solving is being done here

The Last Free City (this thread has died recently, but might be of interest to those wishing to see how this began)

The Matrix Community(also isn't very active right now)

For those, who aren't familiar with the Matrix-Movies: The company, Neo (the protagonist of the Matrix-Movies) worked for was named 'Metacortex' and inside this company, there was a name tag with the name 'Metacortech' written on it.

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