weekly update
posted 10/30
reading: Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin), Understanding Media (McLuhan)
working on: a touching/talking training/exploring device, a series of comment card feedback exploration (more to come), a very unresolved idea about eye contact
thinking about: In the past three days the Happiness Hat has been featured on over 100 blogs, on TV, and the video has been viewed by more than 140,000 people. This was much more of a response than expected, and in thinking about that and also the question of how art functions in the age of electronic reproduction posed by Peter Lunenfeld, the question of audience comes up for me. I think that the creation of technologies that allow instantaneous mass communication forces the artist to consider much more who her target audience(s) is, why, and how best to reach them. The experience of an artwork is no longer limited to the art community, there is now the possibility to reach any community, and choices must be made about the piece based on this decision. The documentation of the work also becomes a part of the piece as well, changing the meaning in some ways, but also offering the potential to add new elements ors layers of depth. Anyway, we have to write 500 words on this topic so there will be more thinking about that to come.
On another note, I’ve been hearing a lot lately from various professors, speakers, peers, etc about what art can not be…design, education, objective, scientific, informative, to name a few… I guess I believe, naively maybe, that anything has the potential to be art, so I’m now on a mission to see if I can make everything in my life into art, or at least blur the boundary between it all as much as possible. Perhaps then I will be able to find out for myself what art can not be.
Finally, I’ve just been feeling overwhelmed (though maybe overwhelmed is the wrong word) by questions lately. How easy is it to change your mood or someone else’s? What is the potential for feedback to change what we act, think and feel? Could we somehow use technology to train us to be more human? What does this mean? When is trying to push or change oneself to fit better into some model a good thing vs a bad thing? How is it that you can appear to fit well with everyone, yet feel like in some ways you really don’t? Would using negative pain feedback to train this positive behavior cancel out the pleasure caused by smiling? Or could it somehow raise the threshold of the whole system, stimulating us to feel everything more intensely? Is it important to be happy or feel good rather than bad? Does feeling good all the time/refusing to let problems or less than ideal situations frustrate or upset you limit your desire to make a change? How often does the appearance we project misrepresent what we are really thinking and feeling? In what ways are expectations, patterns, and appearances positive and useful? In what ways are they negative or limiting? How do you choose your audience? What do you compromise in the choosing? How can you make a piece work on multiple levels? What qualities does a work need to have for it to grow and evolve for you in the production of it? What questions can you ask that provoke more questions?
main goal this week: really get moving on production on this touching thing, but also it still feels fuzzy and not quite right… also figure out the topic for the paper for Peter’s class
happiness hat
posted 10/27
The Happiness Hat is a wearable device that detects if you’re smiling and provides pain feedback if you’re not. An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. This is the first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Interacting.
weekly update
posted 10/24
reading: Society of the Spectacle (Debord), Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin)
working on: happiness hat, finishing, documentation
thinking about: Michael Kontopolous/Casey Reas pointed me toward the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Noam Toran, their term “critical design”, and some of the other work that came out of Royal College of Art and Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s Computing Culture group at the Media Lab…had seen most of this before, but cool stuff.
Casey also brought up a good point about use, refinement, and documentation. Just because a project is “made” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “finished”. The way it is actually used, the degree to which it is refined, and the way it is represented through documentation and display are parts of the piece and can add context and depth. Important to think explicitly about the choices I’m making with these things and what they mean.
So basically, what I’ve been thinking of lately are various ways my projects could function as a way to reconcile my behavior and the general discomfort I often feel in many social situations with society’s expectations of “normal” interaction behavior…while also trying to question these expectations and their purposes. This could mean tools that help one adapt to fit in better with society, projects that attempt to mold the world to fit better around the individual, or maybe projects that attempt to change or question both…exploring altogether different ways of interacting. Thinking about a touch/conversation piece right now, more to come…
to do this week: finish up the happiness hat (for reals), start on this next project, think of another shorter series of experiments maybe, ooh and a hardcore software project would be really fun but I haven’t thought of anything along those lines really yet…also start thinking about the topic of my paper for my media history/theory class – roughly 10 pages on anything within this topic, could really help to think through what I want to work on and why… oh yeah and carve pumpkins and go trick or treating!
weekly update: ok starting for real
posted 10/16
I’ve been meaning to do weekly updates, both for documentation purposes and to take a moment each week to reflect and summarize what I’m thinking about. it hasn’t happened until now, but hopefully it continues.
reading: Social Intelligence (Goleman), Society of the Spectacle (Debord), The Language of New Media (Manovich), Snap to Grid (Lunenfeld)
working on: happiness helmet (hat? headband? wearable…) – detects smile size and inflicts pain inversely proportional
thinking about: social neuroscience
amae – a Japanese word that has no English equivalent but Goleman describes it as “empathy that is taken for granted, and acted upon, without calling attention to itself.” He says, “Amae seems to take for granted a mutual priming of aprallel feelings and thoughts in people who are attuned. The unvoiced attitude is something like: if I feel it, so should you – and so I needn’t tell you what I want, feel, or need. You should be closely enough attuned to me to sense it and so to act on it without a word needed.”
projection vs empathy (and creating a feedback loop)
rejection triggering the same spot in the ACC as physical pain, perhaps suggesting that the pain center evolved the sensitivity to social rejection as an alarm signal to warn of potential banishment – and to prompt us to repair the threatened relationship, and another more recent study relating the brain processing of a lot of social experiences to physical ones (Lieberman & Eisenberger)
microexpressions – and eckhart’s training software
dyssemia – a deficit in reading – and so acting on – the nonverbal signs that guide smooth interactions
Goleman: social intelligence = social awareness (primal empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, social cognition) + social facility (synchrony, self-presentation, influence, concern)
I-you vs I-it relationships (the utility of each, the switch between, the murky blend space)
those cards on the big blue buses where, if your driver was particularly friendly, you can let him know
to do this week: finish the wearable, start another project, think about idea for kinetic piece
