The Multiple Self

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