Dear Helgi,
What a pleasure to hear from you! Thank you very much for your thoughts, which being both poetic and scientific are so delightful. Please let me re-read your note and mull it over a bit before responding ... I won't be long because I'm eager to grow the conversation. To be sure, I feel that in Montreal we are just feeling our way, so I would be open to much refinement. May I summarize for you the preliminary ideas of the Memory+Place group for some sketches even if they are very preliminary? Would you be comfortable with me sharing our conversation with David Morris, my philosopher / phenomenologist colleague?
One first thought. I do not know what David or I would define as "space" (yet). We are interested in the person's corporeal comportment in a surround that includes the physical architecture, but also other objects and people's bodies in motion too. We are not making a virtual space in the usual sense of images projected by computer onto a screen ("virtual reality"). However we do use the tools of spatialized sound, projected video, and theatrical lighting, responding in real-time to the corporeal activity of people in the room. (We do not use sensors of physiological data like breathing or electrical signals because we don't have the knowledge in the TML to measure and interpret them well.)
Regarding "temporal preferentially acoustic patterns like sounds or rhythms in different locations in the acoustic space and have them reconstructed after a certain span of time" -- yes! In fact, some of our most promising sketches so far, to my mind, involve walking across a floor with audible footsteps, transferring binaural sound from one person to another, with or without controlled delays. The person may be listening to his own footsteps. It may be necessary to ask the person to close his or her eyes. I will flesh this out more in my next letter to you.
These sketches are far from an experiment, but we are still thinking about scenarios that could indeed explore your thinking that we are memory. Now I will need to sleep on your letter.... Thank you very much.
On a different note, I've been curious by what NESSI does, ever since Helga mentioned it to me years ago. Would it be of interest to re-implement NESSI in a present day computing environment if one could somehow get the support to hire an adequately prepared scientific programmer? Would it take a lot of special neuroscientific or statistical expertise to re-code it, with some sort of "rate" control ?
Warm regards,
Xin Wei