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| transient_realities_or_verges_of_con-fusion [2015-04-06 13:38] – nik | transient_realities_or_verges_of_con-fusion [2015-04-06 13:54] (current) – nik |
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| Calvino's essay "6 memos for the next millennium" suggests that in order to create interesting literature in the coming 1000 years, the texts should embody one or more of the following characteristics; multiplicity, lightness, visibility, exactitude, quickness and consistency. We found these characteristics strongly resonating with qualities that we want to achieve in our designs. The multiplicity of forms, media and materials that are involved in constructing a reality; the lightness and simplicity that the works carry in order to encourage playful behaviour, the visibility, or synaesthetic approach to dispersing signals through different media; the play of exactitude and vagueness of forms; the quickness of sonic and visual phrases and the consistency that makes the environments coherent realities. | Calvino's essay "6 memos for the next millennium" suggests that in order to create interesting literature in the coming 1000 years, the texts should embody one or more of the following characteristics; multiplicity, lightness, visibility, exactitude, quickness and consistency. We found these characteristics strongly resonating with qualities that we want to achieve in our designs. The multiplicity of forms, media and materials that are involved in constructing a reality; the lightness and simplicity that the works carry in order to encourage playful behaviour, the visibility, or synaesthetic approach to dispersing signals through different media; the play of exactitude and vagueness of forms; the quickness of sonic and visual phrases and the consistency that makes the environments coherent realities. |
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| Irreal Universes | ===Irreal Universes=== |
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| Another parallel with Calvino's approach is the quest for diverse forms to express visions, ideas and sensations of alternate universes, inspired by discoveries in contemporary science. FoAM's work is similarly inspired by scientific endeavours, especially the ones probing the fundaments of life and uncovering the inherent wondrous, sometimes even alien beauty hidden underneath common physical, biological and chemical processes. In TRG, we ventured to explore more quirky or abnormal phenomena in contemporary theoretical physics, that tend to occur on much smaller and much larger than human scales. One of the rather fertile theories in our research proved to be a very speculative M-theory, or Membrane Theory, proposed by Edward Witten as a contemporary "theory of everything". The concepts from m-theory (and it's related hypothesis from physics and mathematics) that tickled our imagination were related to ideas of the universe being shaped by minuscule fields of energy (strings, branes), whose actions through time form into world-sheets, a reality being drawn through motion, but also: | Another parallel with Calvino's approach is the quest for diverse forms to express visions, ideas and sensations of alternate universes, inspired by discoveries in contemporary science. FoAM's work is similarly inspired by scientific endeavours, especially the ones probing the fundaments of life and uncovering the inherent wondrous, sometimes even alien beauty hidden underneath common physical, biological and chemical processes. In TRG, we ventured to explore more quirky or abnormal phenomena in contemporary theoretical physics, that tend to occur on much smaller and much larger than human scales. One of the rather fertile theories in our research proved to be a very speculative M-theory, or Membrane Theory, proposed by Edward Witten as a contemporary "theory of everything". The concepts from m-theory (and it's related hypothesis from physics and mathematics) that tickled our imagination were related to ideas of the universe being shaped by minuscule fields of energy (strings, branes), whose actions through time form into world-sheets, a reality being drawn through motion, but also: |
| "Not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things." Italo Calvino | "Not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things." Italo Calvino |
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| 8 realities | ===8 realities=== |
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| While conceiving the transient reality we looked at different historical conceptions of 'the way the world works' and how it's reflected in understanding what reality is and how (human) consciousness deals with it. The most resonant of recent theories seemed to be the exo-psychological model put forth by Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary in the 1960s. According to Wilson and Leary, there are as many realities as there are neuro-anatomical structures for the processing of signals in the brain. They suggest that our brains, societies and realities evolve through 8 circuits: bio-survival, emotional-territorial, dexterity-symbolic, social-sexual, neuro-somatic, neuro-electric, neuro-genetic and neuro-atomic. Our contemporary societies tend to converge between the 3rd and the 4th circuit, while the developments in science, technology and cultural production should allow the societal organisation to evolve to the 5th (psycho-somatic) circuit. The 5th circuit implies a 'body-consciousness', through which we are more aware of our sensory perception of reality, and learn to respond to direct (natural) signals, unburdened by mere survival or sexual strategies. Reaching the 5th circuit means beginning a dialogue with the environment around us, thereby perceiving that we are necessarily intertwined with all its features and processes. | While conceiving the transient reality we looked at different historical conceptions of 'the way the world works' and how it's reflected in understanding what reality is and how (human) consciousness deals with it. The most resonant of recent theories seemed to be the exo-psychological model put forth by Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary in the 1960s. According to Wilson and Leary, there are as many realities as there are neuro-anatomical structures for the processing of signals in the brain. They suggest that our brains, societies and realities evolve through 8 circuits: bio-survival, emotional-territorial, dexterity-symbolic, social-sexual, neuro-somatic, neuro-electric, neuro-genetic and neuro-atomic. Our contemporary societies tend to converge between the 3rd and the 4th circuit, while the developments in science, technology and cultural production should allow the societal organisation to evolve to the 5th (psycho-somatic) circuit. The 5th circuit implies a 'body-consciousness', through which we are more aware of our sensory perception of reality, and learn to respond to direct (natural) signals, unburdened by mere survival or sexual strategies. Reaching the 5th circuit means beginning a dialogue with the environment around us, thereby perceiving that we are necessarily intertwined with all its features and processes. |
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| The translation | ===The translation=== |
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| The most challenging task for the TRG team was the materialisation of myriad of conceptual worlds to a corporeal scale and through empirical experiments (mostly based on design heuristics of trial-and-error). Our means of expression were the multiplicity of forms that Calvino talked about in '6 memos...' (sound, image, tactile texture of a material, food, dialogue...). We set processes in motion that would allow this multiplicity to compose together so as to provide a 'total', or 'synaesthetic' experience, stretching through and between the senses. | The most challenging task for the TRG team was the materialisation of myriad of conceptual worlds to a corporeal scale and through empirical experiments (mostly based on design heuristics of trial-and-error). Our means of expression were the multiplicity of forms that Calvino talked about in '6 memos...' (sound, image, tactile texture of a material, food, dialogue...). We set processes in motion that would allow this multiplicity to compose together so as to provide a 'total', or 'synaesthetic' experience, stretching through and between the senses. |
| Imagine your movement extending into ruptured surfaces and relentless, tentacled curvature. Sonic fields splattering into (re)modulated and (un)structured light. Strange shapes brushing against your skin, destabilizing your motion. You feel your limbs slowing down, until you carefully crawl on a smooth surface of a large pliant membrane and dare to touch the fickle world around you. Through the bumps and craters, pocky skin and viscous liquids, you can feel it touching back, becoming aware of your intentions, opening up its secrets and allowing you to affect its physical forces. Attracting, repulsing, binding and transforming the fundaments of the world, you gradually grasp the dialogue forming through the stormy fingers of this world. You feel a nauseating disruption of your visual perception, as the empty space in between physical objects begins filling up with elusive imagery of bubbling, luminescent membranes, whispering in deep tectonic voices. Unable to orient yourself using your eyes and ears, you rely on your sense of touch begin traversing the space... | Imagine your movement extending into ruptured surfaces and relentless, tentacled curvature. Sonic fields splattering into (re)modulated and (un)structured light. Strange shapes brushing against your skin, destabilizing your motion. You feel your limbs slowing down, until you carefully crawl on a smooth surface of a large pliant membrane and dare to touch the fickle world around you. Through the bumps and craters, pocky skin and viscous liquids, you can feel it touching back, becoming aware of your intentions, opening up its secrets and allowing you to affect its physical forces. Attracting, repulsing, binding and transforming the fundaments of the world, you gradually grasp the dialogue forming through the stormy fingers of this world. You feel a nauseating disruption of your visual perception, as the empty space in between physical objects begins filling up with elusive imagery of bubbling, luminescent membranes, whispering in deep tectonic voices. Unable to orient yourself using your eyes and ears, you rely on your sense of touch begin traversing the space... |
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| Public experiment in Kibla | ===Public experiment in Kibla=== |
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| The first instantiation of this responsive environment was constructed in Kibla's freshly renovated gallery Kibela in Maribor, Slovenia. In the winter coloured town and smoke veiled cyber-cafe, we worked for a month to develop a site-specific experiment, that could accommodate people from all ages, both genders, a variety of social backgrounds, with and without mental and/or physical disabilities. | The first instantiation of this responsive environment was constructed in Kibla's freshly renovated gallery Kibela in Maribor, Slovenia. In the winter coloured town and smoke veiled cyber-cafe, we worked for a month to develop a site-specific experiment, that could accommodate people from all ages, both genders, a variety of social backgrounds, with and without mental and/or physical disabilities. |
nik