Reset of erception& Construction of Experiencesin the Digital Age

Abstract
This project explores the philosophical aspect of perception, the influenceof digital technology in human experiences and the speculation for a futuremachine that can construct new experiences and reset human perception.

Reaserch Methods Research Question
The sources that used in this research are mainly books, articles, online posts, design and artistic projects, and films.

The Allegory of the Cave Plato Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave allof their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire
behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing
reality. The philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on thewall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seenby the prisoners.
Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty Perception is the background of experience
which guides every conscious action. Perception is not purely sensation, nor is it purely interpretation.
Consciousness is a process that includes sensing as well as reasoning. Every sensation belongs to a sensory
field, which implies that all senses are spatial and that all sensory objects must occupy space.

Could we construct our own experiences and reset our perception with futuristic digital technologies?

erception& Reality

BackgroundWe invest the perceived reality with values andunderstandings that refer essentially to our lives and bodies,but we often forget that this reality is as it appears to theseperceived values and that it is not a truth in itself.

It is the same in Plato’s allegory, in which what people taketo be real would, in fact, be an illusion. According to Plato, the “Forms” or “Ideas”,
and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess thehighest and most fundamental kind of reality.
Looking at the results of Nozick’s experiment we see that most people would notchoose to plug into the experience machine. There are more things that matter to us
than just the way that we feel. We want to do things, and not just to experience
doing them.

The Experience Machine Robert Nozick “Suppose that there was an experience machine that would give
you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think
and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time, you would befloating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogrammingyour life’s experiences?”

In the DigitalAge

From the perspective of the evolution of humanconsciousness, technology can be seen as both aneffect and a change agent. It is an effect in that it
requires a certain sophistication of human thought
to develop a particular technology.

Technology has altered also our flow of time. With the tech progress, we are forced to function
on a tech speed, which contradicts our human rhythms. We also customize our experiences by
doing multiple things at once and document every moment of our life, detaching ourselves fromliving the moments ourselves.
Technology affects our perception of the world not only by offering sensory feedback but also
by shaping our interpretive acts of perception. The technologies that we take into an embodied
relation-such as VR, fade from our awareness as objects in themselves.

Matrix The Wachowski Brothers The main character is trapped in a false
reality created by a computer program. While in Plato’s Allegory of theCave, a prisoner is able to comprehend the reality of the cave and thereal one outside the cave.
Outrospectre Frank Kolkman To tackle “death anxiety” among terminallyill hospital patients, this device simulates a near-death experience.

Influence ofThe machine to be another Be another lab An embodied virtual reality
system that allows anyone to experience the world from the perspectiveof another.

TechnologyAnalysis
I imagine the digital world as a contemporary Plato’s
cave. Our virtual portraits live into it and experienceand learn with different ways and with accelerated
rhythm, in contrast to real life experiences. It is liketwo parallel lives, that its one interrupts the otherthough.

But these technologies don’t really change the way we perceive. We still
perceive with our senses and with our subjective perspective of the world.
Present digital technologies, like empathy VR projects, have many benefit
influences in human experiences, but they don’t change the way weperceive the reality, they are just strong and extraordinary experiences.

Another major problem with these technologies is that we have become blind to so much seeing. We have toconsider that the body is not absent during the viewing. A person connected to the internet is considered not only
physically in the space in front of the computer but also virtually represented. This indicates the potential for thebody to simultaneously exist in two realities, internally and externally experiencing and being experienced.
How Does Technology Transform Our Perception? Don Ihde At the heart of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenologicalapproach to technology is an analysis of various types of relations between human beings, technologies, and theworld.
Neurophysiology-based art in immersive virtual reality Doron Friedman, Ayal Donenfeld and Eli Zafran This
article refers to virtual reality art which often deals with issues of embodied interaction versus the fantasy ofdisembodiment.
Peak Performance Rachel Rossin This exhibition explores how welose touch with our bodies in virtual spaces.
Objective Realities Automato farm Becoming anobject in a smart home is a VR experience thatchanges the perspective from a human point of viewto the one of an object.

Critisicm

Conclusion
Inspired by the Experience machine, I speculate a futuristic digitaltechnology, through which we could succeed to construct new experiences
and reset our perception. We could erase memories or build new fake realities.
Through this machine, our perception would reset.

& Speculation

TV Helmet/Portable Living Room and Small Room
Walter Pichler These isolating simulators remove
one from a given reality and can be seen as the ultimate conclusion oftechnology’s encroachment on the body.

The reason that I make this proposal is because I want tocriticize the disembodiment and the discomfort that a fiction
machine like that would have. A machine that lives our life forus. My aim is to create a work like a manifestation of the digital“uncanny”. A “good-bad” machine that we can identify on ananthropocentric level yet still seem unreal or inauthentic.

Regarded to current “intelligent” machines, I believe that to change our perception we need an unbiased machine.
But can a machine, which is made by humans, be objective? And what does the change of perception mean? Do wewant a change in this way?
As we become ever more disembodied from daily life through various means of technology, my work aims to locate
an expanded awareness of how we might physically engage the world, using our entire bodies—not just our heads—
as tools for gaining experience and knowledge. My work aims to possess a skeptical or sarcastic undertone for theexperience machines of the future.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear
to man as it is, Infinite.”
William Blake

MA Interaction Design Communication Interaction Futures & Speculative Design
13 Mar 2018

Other Machines

ELENI XYNOGALA