Flesh & Metal: reconfiguring the mindbody in virtual environments
- Focus on the idea of relation and posit (to assume the existence of) as the dynamic flux from which the body and embodiment emerge
- Relation:
• embodied experience arises from the constant engagement of our embodied interactions with the environment – change in environment = change in embodiment
• Technologically and information rich environment brings shifts in habits, postures, enactments – changes within our dynamic lifeworld
- Kinds of changes:
• Habits: proprioception-internal sense that gives us the feeling that we occupy our bodies, rather than possessing them
• i.e. computer game players: body boundaries intermingled with technological affordances- joystick is an unconscious extension of the hand
• Cognition: smart environments-cognition should not be seen as taking place in the brain alone.
• Extended mind-a characteristic of humans is to enroll objects into their cognitive systems
• We are cyborgs- human technology symbiots. Mind and selves are spread across biological brain and non biological circuitry
- Relation as enactment
• “the embodied mind” – Varela, Thompson and Rosch
• Living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specifications
• Enaction: dynamic interplay between self and world
• Discussion of Virtual Reality environment: “Traces” -Simon Penny
Avatar interface- escape our bodies and move into transcendent spaces where we can avoid the ravages of time
• Connections to intelligent machines that enact the human-machine boundary as mutual emergence
- Relation as perception
• “the brightness confound” – Massumi
• Perception is ‘a singular confound of what are described empirically as separate dimensions of vision” - they are absolute
• Someone experiencing a hallucination would be unable to distinguish it from reality
• Discussion of Virtual Reality environment: “Einsteins Brain” project, Alan Dunning–the brain as a physical object considered in isolation from the world cannot account for the richness of human experience
- Relation as enculturation
• Discussion of Virtual Reality environment: “nØtime” – Victoria Vesna
• Insists on the distributed cognitive collaborations that construct it, especially the global community (internet)
• Simultaneously insists on importance of local interactions and proximity
• Idea: create avatars that could take over portions of our lives while we’re busy doing other things
• Enacts the human body as an emergent phenomenon coming into existence through multiple agencies: desires, social interactions
- Relation as the Posthuman
• VR artworks: realise the importance of emergent rationality in mind and body-transforming into the mindbody which is embedded in our relations with the techno world
• We do not exist in order to relate, rather, we relate in order that we may exist as fully realised human beings
The virtual world in one way provides a freedom we haven't really expereinced before - being in more than one place at a time e.g. having an avatar complete activities through virtual reality. However, at what cost does this come?
ReplyDeleteIn the tutorial today I will be showing one of Patricia Piccinini works "Game Boys Advanced". The models of two apparently young boys crowding over a game boy show they have significantly aged because they have limited their "activity to a virtual world". The cost is maybe they have lost their youth by growing up so quickly in the virtual world.
In the end, what is the limit to allowing robots and computer programs, e.g. avatars, to do things for us? Will it ever get to a point where we all just sit on couches and machines with artifical intelligence complete day to day tasks?
This is the trailer to the Bruce Willis move "Surrogates"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGwQ74cH5O0
It is a very stupid film but it shows the possible pit falls to allowing machines/technology to do everything. It is overly dramatic but I thought it would be fun for one last blog post (lol!).
yes this is what concerned me most when reading the article - how reliant we are becoming on technology.. soon we won't need to think at all because machines do it all for us.
ReplyDeletelike we discussed yesterday about GPS', gone are the days of using a map book (and a passenger to help navigate which could be fun!) so find places-now we just listen to an electronic voice.
so i'm not really loving the idea of smart environments too much, i really think they are making us less and less human.
but just like other technology we once thought was ludacris, im sure it will become a part of our lives and soon we wont remember the days when we didnt have them.
I do agree with your views that technology could make us less human in a sense, however GPS's for example can sometimes take people on longer routes and people may have their vews towards them, but I think that people benefit a lot from techonology. In the case of a GPS, a driver would have most likely been distracted reading a road map, and this could lead to accidents, where a gps tells the driver where to go and makes people's lives a lot easier.
ReplyDelete