From: Helgi Schweizer <jon.helgi@web.de>
Date: March 9, 2010 4:05:25 AM EST
Subject: Body and soul
Dear Xin Wei.
Here comes a fresh collection of crazy experimental ideas for
lunatic experimental setups.
Best regards
Helgi
28 Feb 2010 (?)
Dear Xin Wei.
The challenging idea of breaking up the oneness of me and my body has bothered me
for a while. I am favourably impressed by your equipment, but I am not sure, if I do exactly grasp what can and what cannot be accomplished by means of that wonderful
machinery. We are not used to such options here.
If we really want to separate body and soul, (as seems to happen occasionally in schizophrenia and epilepsy; they call it out of body phenomenon) we should propably resort to the temporal domain and some kind of holodeck environment.
We would have to project some kind of „space“ on all six walls or sides of a cube and have it move (forward, backward, turn or tilt) in a controllable mode. The movement
of the projected space should be controlled by the movements of the subject in the cube, however with a certain (short) temporal delay.
The idea somehow invokes the William-Lee-effect in the visual realm. It is not garanteed at all, that the contraption works in the expected way, but I think it might be useful to go a little bit furter into the matter. Maybe we come upon some ways to simplify the apparatus or we contrive some simple pilot experiments.
The central thought is, that we should try to disrupt or disturb the union of the decision to do something (for instance to move forward), and the sensory feedback, respectively the effect, that this decision is usually connected to.
Ok. This is so far my best afflatus.
It seems rather easy to contrive more complicated versions of the experimental setup, for instance, we could try longer delays, that means, the actions (locomotions) and their
visual presentation (feedback) might be separated by seconds. You act so to speak in your own past. To be honest, I have no clue, what the consequences are to the perception of space and the self.
Talking about memory we have the tendency to think first and foremost of the retrieval of stored contents i.e. perceptions, actions and symbolic items. The immediate experience however is predominantly governed by what is called the short or even ultra short term memory. This kind of memory on the other side is not an issue in school and therefore receives less attention in psychological studies.
Monday P.S.
Maybe the following idea is of interest to you. We (Wicki and me) use to organize at least one happening or jazz concert every year in our garden house (Hundingshalle).
This time I am pondering on some kind of delayed dancing with oneself. The idea goes as follows: There is a band improvising on a certain theme and a dancer completely dressed in black dancing to the music. The dancer is illuminated by a beamer projection.
The whole scene (the projected video, the dancer and most important his or her shadow)
is recorded and uses for projection in the second, setting, i,e, in the ultimate perfomance.
The dancer then dances to the live music and to the projection of himself/herself. There are four synchronized „shadow-dancers“ on stage in the real performance.
It should be easy to iterate the process and have more dancers and shadows dancing simultaneously. One could try to alter the speed of the projected dancing, for instance double it and/or multiply the beamers projecting with or without delays and tempo-shifts.
There are some questions connected to this performance, that me and my students are specially interested in. So for instance, we would like to know how the recall of body-movement is stimulated or influenced by dancing in alignment to own former dancing moves.
Best regards
Helgi
From: Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com>
Date: February 27, 2010 4:22:36 AM EST
To: Helgi Schweizer <jon.helgi@web.de>
Subject: OZONE media choreography system, and the Topological Media Lab and Hexagram technical facilities
Dear Helgi,
Thank you very much for brainstorming with me! We don't have scientific quality equipment -- no laboratory grade measurement instruments for physiological (electrical signals in the body) [nor the knowledge to do such measurements].
But we can easily generate a Lee effect. Your report of the effect is fascinating. In fact one of the first proposals is to delay sound and pass it back to the person either in headphones or through a speaker array. (See below.)
But as for the technical means, let me describe our OZONE (custom software and some standard hardware) architecture:
...