Class 12: Presence

“You cannot not communicate.” — Paul Watzlawik

Discussion: Presence
How can something digital, something distant, something that is generated by zeroes and ones be present?  What might that mean?

Quite simply, Michael Moschen has revolutionized juggling, refining it into an art and a bit of a science. With a few flying balls and well-chosen props he will completely re-wire your notions of the physically possible.

Watch

Tell me, what genre of tool, or game, or thing, is this?

1. Please post an entry in your blog: critique someone else’s brain prosthetic project.
2. Complete your gorgeous prototype of your Brain/Mental Prosthetic. How does it work, what does it look like, how does it make you feel?

The Inner History of Devices

Sherry Turkle – “We love with the objects we think with, we think with the objects we love.”

“Technology in every form raises the question of human purposes and asks what those purposes are, but this only occurs if we come to technology with prepared minds and open hearts.” – Sherry Turkle
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634 (start at the 3 minute mark)

Turkle reads snippets from her three books, which, as an ensemble, tell the story of the intellectual and emotional links between objects and ourselves. Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed … that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”

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