The Multiple Self

My research involves the design of 'Immersive Interactive Experiences'. Experiences which would allow immersion in a multi-sensory environment, affecting sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing respectively, conferring on the mind the ability both to induce and create new conceptual and sensory structures.

Such 'Immersion' invlolves research into interactive digital technologies like the internet, virtual reality and also the fast developing field of Augmented Reality or Ubiquitous Computing which is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.

Attributes of an 'Immersive Interactive Experience':
- An experience which would 'invisibly' enhance the world that already exists rather than creating apparatus for simulating a virtual reality.
- An experience which would not require participants to touch/look at a screen, wear special goggles that project an artificial scene on their eyes or wear gloves or even body suits but instead would allow participants to have enriching experiences with for example grass, trees, benches, rocks, chance encounters and in general with the infinite richness of the universe.
- An experience where content and meaning will be created out of the viewer's interactions.
- An experience which would be unstable, shifting and in flux.
- An experience which would parallel life not through representation or narrative, but in its process of emergence, uncertainty and transformation.
- An experience which would favour the ontology of becoming, rather than the assertion of being.
- An experience of enactment without audience.
- An intimate experience, the free flowing outcome of interaction between participants within networks of information.

Interactive street Furniture creating Immersive Interactive experiences:
I am currently looking at how Interactive street furniture generating Immersive Interactive Experiences can create an urban renaissance in the developing worlds towns and cities. By 'Street Furniture' I mean trees, benches and tables, sculptures, water fountains, rocks, fences, posts, flower pots & boxes, garbage bins etc. and also things like telephone booths, kiosks, dynamic and static signage etc. How can Interactive street Furniture be part of a Public Awareness campaign? How can high impact Interactive media be used for efficient public communication i.e. to deliver important messages, instructions & information to mobile out of home users? Instead of trying to forcefully inform the public about environmental and social issues through a broadcast model, where the public passively observes a screen, How can we create innovative experiences which would encourage/allow the public to inform itself about issues like pollution, health and other social issues where each individual will be able to get a unique personal perspective on how he/she affects the urban environment? How can these Immersive Interactive Experiences allow government agencies & councils to recreate and strengthen relationships with the public and effectively improve the perception of provided services.
Discuss

Wish you all a very Happy Diwali! For those of you who dont know what Diwali is: Diwali is a hindu festival of lights. The word "Diwali" is the corruption of the Sanskrit word "Deepavali" - Deepa meaning light and Avali, meaning a row. It means a row of lights and indeed illumination forms its main attraction. Every home - lowly or mightly - the hut of the poor or the mansion of the rich - is alit with the orange glow of twinkling diyas-small earthen lamps - to welcome Lakshmi, Goddess of wealth and prosperity. Multi-coloured Rangoli designs, floral decorations and fireworks lend picturesness and grandeur to this festival which heralds joy, mirth and happiness in the ensuring year.

Ever heard of the 'Terrorist Information Awareness' (TIA) program? Below are a few excerpts from TIA's Mission.
"to identify abnormal events or activities that may include rebel actions before damaging events occur."
"to apply intelligent pattern recognition in identifying latent relationships and behaviors that may help point to potential terrorist threats."
Discuss

"Engineers in the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the University at Buffalo have developed a new technology that transmits the sensation of touch over the Internet. The researchers call their technology "sympathetic haptics," which means "having the ability to feel what another person feels," Kesavadas says. The technology communicates what another person is feeling through an active-tracking haptics system linked between two personal computers."

Very soon we will be literally "keeping in touch"with people on the internet!!
Discuss

"Our experiments with the technology of being, involving for example VR, telepresence, hypermedia, may be the prelude to our eventual migration from the body into other forms of identity. Unlike the material body, the mind cannot be contained; it leaks out everywhere. It is as if our destiny is to make intelligence ubiquitous (ubiquitous computing). Migration from the body does not imply its disappearance but the emergence of THE MULTIPLE SELF, the distributed body, whose telepresent corporeality creates its own field of being. - Roy Ascott, Seeing Double: Art and the Technology of Transcendence

In other words, the multiple self is created by our ability, aided by computer technology, to move effortlessly through the infinities of cyberspace while at the same time accommodating ourselves within the structures of the material world.
Discuss

I was looking at the website for Sensomatic's Sensorama and I particularly liked three sensoramas: 'the shy worm', 'elektro eier' and the 'basic blubb'. In each of these three sensorama's, the 'Haptic' sense or the sense of touch has been extended quite well through the interaction of elements on the screen. It seems to me that the combination of the visual, the sound and the interactive play that emerges because of the way one moves the cursor in each of these sensoramas all seem to aiming at recreating or extending our sense of touch.
"For more than a century now artists (and now digital artists) have tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a nervous system for unifying all the others" UM, Pg 107
"Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind?" UM, Pg 108
"Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide concensus" UM, Pg 108
Discuss

This is it!!! I have finally made my debut in the blogging world!
Discuss