Reset of Perception & Construction of Experiences in the Digital Age
30 March 2018

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
— William Blake
This critical report is the documentation of the research entitled “Reset of Perception & Construction of Experiences in the Digital Age”, that conducted in the unit “Interaction Futures & Speculative Design” and specifically in the brief of “Other Machines”. Here you will find a critical perspective on the research developed to speculate and question normal notions of what a machine is or could be.

Starting this unit, I tried to find something that I am interested in and care for research. I was trying to find something that is related to human behavioral traits or body experience. The sparkle for the inspiration came from an Anish Kapoor‘s (2014) installation called “Decension”, where there was a connection of its meaning with Plato’s allegory of the cave.

This allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work “The Republic” to illustrate people’s nature in education. Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of 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. According to Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners (Badiou, 2012).

Socrates describes a scenario in which what people take to be real would, in fact, be an illusion. In his allegory, there are three interesting roles. The role of the philosopher, who is the person that escape from the fake reality, trying to find the true life. According to Plato, the “Forms” or “Ideas”, and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.
This allegory made me feel interested to answer some questions like what is real? how do we perceive the reality? how can we doubt what we know? how are political ideas filtered and told to masses? and why are people afraid of going out of their comfort zone and search for the truth? Trying to answer these questions I turned to secondary research, mainly reading books and articles, online observation, design and artistic projects, and films.


This topic is expressed very successfully in movies like “Matrix” from The Wachowski Brothers (1999), where the main character is trapped in a false reality created by a computer program, or “Dogtooth” from Yorgos Lanthimos (2009), where three teenagers live isolated in their house and perceive reality only as their over-protective parents present it to them.


Another similar philosophical framework is the “brain in a vat”, where a machine removes a person’s brain from the body, suspend it in a vat and simulates reality (Wong, 2014). But also, a parable from Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) that describes “Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”, that challenges definitions of reality and illusion (Wu, 1990).
Presenting these ideas in my classmates and tutors I took useful feedback that was mainly focused on the plurality of ideas that I should narrow down and on the design direction of my idea. Tobias Revell proposed to me to look also in more contemporary theories, suggesting me to read the “Phenomenology of Perception” from Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty (2002) defines phenomenology as the study of essences, including the essence of perception and of consciousness. Sensing is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life.” We invest the perceived reality with values and understandings that refer essentially to our lives and bodies, but we often forget that this reality is as it appears to these perceived values and that it is not a truth in itself.
Reading a big part of this book gave me insight into a very difficult subject. It was hard to understand all the ideas and took me a lot of time to realize how I want to combine the research with my design practice. Then, Wesley Goatley proposed to me to look at Virtual Reality technology, where I found influential projects that I will describe later.
Nicolas gave me some sources that discuss the subject of how does technology transform our perception. At the heart of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological approach to technology is an analysis of various types of relations between human beings, technologies, and the world. Ihde (2013) investigated in which ways technologies play a role in human-world relations, ranging from being “embodied” and being “read”, to being “interacted with” and being at the “background”.
So, looking at these subjects I started defining my research questions and the purpose of my subject. The main goal of this research was the philosophical aspect of perception, the influence of digital technology on human experiences and the speculation for a future machine that can construct new experiences and reset human perception. Specifically, my research questions defined here as how do we perceive the world in philosophical terms? does digital technology transform the way we perceive the world? could we construct our own experiences and reset our perception with futuristic digital technologies?
As Wesley Goatley mentioned in a presentation in LCC, different ankle or camera or lens change the result of the photography and as a result of the receiving perspective. There are subjectivities from the photographer in the decisions he makes for the camera. Digital technology is made of and used by people, so each result that comes from the technology will not be objective. There is always bias because of the subjectivity and our perception of the world.
From the perspective of the evolution of human consciousness, technology can be seen as both an effect and a change agent. It is an effect in that it requires a certain sophistication of human thought to develop a particular technology. Two examples of technology that are change agents of human consciousness are television and the internet. Each of these technologies has changed our lives by making far more information available than ever before and by bringing the world into our own homes in ways that were unthinkable in the pre-twentieth century world. With the appearance of television, our imagination has become much more passive. Now we simply receive, rather than co-create, the stories that we are given. Cyberspace is an invisible sphere of information, which is as almost as real to humanity as the hydrosphere and biosphere.
Technology has altered also our flow of time. Before the tech revolution, our time perception was based on the human speed, a metabolic speed of our bodies, emotions and reflexes. With the tech progress, though, we are forced to function on a tech speed, which contradicts our human rhythms. Working under pressure induced by tech rhythms is like putting your brain in the state of emergency every minute. It doesn’t make you a better professional: on the contrary, being under time pressure and under constant stress is exhausting your nervous system.
We customize our experiences by doing multiple things at once, such as watch television while doing homework. We also try to document every moment of our life, to share them and to look into each other’s lives. However, by taking these Snapchats we partially detach ourselves from living the moments ourselves. This is how today’s society tries to portray everything. You give others a distorted sense of reality because nothing is ever truly perfect, especially when you only experiencing the moment through a screen. Instead of living behind a screen, we need to step away from it and just be. Interacting via technology has become easier than interacting in person. In society today, we feel awkward walking through a crowd of people alone, so we turn to our phones. Whenever we have a moment to ourselves we turn to our phones and don’t think twice about it. We try to stay connected with each other as much as possible but it’s all done digitally. We are addicted to socializing online and it distracts us from being and living. We should stay connected to the real-world and not let it pass us by.
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, do not ordinarily achieve quite so complete a withdrawal, but they do ordinarily fade from our awareness as objects in themselves.


Zuckerberg suggests that VR “is really a new communication platform”. “Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” (Russell, 2014). New VR sites where people can socialize or play games together in virtual spaces, like AltspaceVR and Rec Room, are springing up. And some tech luminaries see a future in which VR is integrated into many more aspects of our daily lives, from movies and entertainment to work and health care. But VR may never really catch on as it causes motion sickness and it is an expensive technology. A concrete example is Facebook’s new VR app, through which you can create yourself in a digital body and socialize with friends in a virtual world. But what is really happening in the physical world is that you are home, alone, connected to a machine.


However, there are influential projects making with VR. One characteristic example is “Outrospectre” by Frank Kolkman. This device simulates a near-death experience. You can explore how new computer technologies can address psychological issues, such as fear of mortality. The machine to be another is an embodied virtual reality system that allows anyone to experience the world from the perspective of another (Carter, 2017).“Objective Realities” is another example that allows you to become an object in a smart home and changes the perspective from a human point of view to the one of an object with the capabilities and limitations of a specific object (Automato.farm, 2018).
I imagine the digital world as a contemporary Plato’s cave. Our virtual portraits live into it and experience and learn with different ways and with accelerated rhythm, in contrast to real life experiences. It is like two parallel lives, that its one interrupts the other though.
A virtual body is a state of being when inhabiting virtual reality or a virtual environment. A person connected to the internet is considered not only physically in the space in front of the computer but also virtually represented, with the opportunity to interact, in cyberspace. This indicates the potential for the body to simultaneously exist in two realities, internally and externally experiencing and being experienced.
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 we perceive the reality, they are just strong and extraordinary experience. Robert Morris claims that “we have become blind for so much seeing” (Owen, 2015). We have to consider that the body is not absent during the viewing.

At this point, I needed to make a futuristic scenario, a fictional speculation that was inspired by Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine, that Helga Schmid proposed me to read. Let’s consider a futuristic machine that simulates reality and construct new experiences and ask ourselves what if there was an experience machine. Robert Nozick (1974) describes “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 be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?”
Nozick (1974) argues that most people would not choose to plug into the experience machine. He states that 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. He argues that humans crave contact with a “deeper reality”. This emphasis on wanting to stay in touch with reality implies that we want more than just the happiness that the machine would be able to supply.
Inspired by the Experience machine, I speculate a futuristic digital technology, through which we could succeed to construct new experiences and reset our perception. Through this machine, we could build new fake realities and our perception would reset. The reason that I make this proposal is because I want to criticize the disembodiment and the discomfort that a fiction machine like that would have. A machine lives our life for us. My aim is to create a work like a manifestation of the digital “uncanny”. A “good-bad” machine–that we can identify on an anthropocentric level (good) yet still seem unreal or inauthentic (bad).
Regarded to current “intelligent” machines, I believe that to change our perception we need an unbiased machine. But can a machine, which is made of human, be objective? And do we want a change in this way? Inspired by all of this research I deal with questions that other artists and practitioners also came with. “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” (Owen, 2015). My futurist work aims to possess a sceptical or sarcastic undertone for the experience machines of the future.

At the final stage of this unit, I needed to create a Research poster. I had collected all the ideas that I wanted to share, but the difficult part was to structure them in a flowchart of a logical sequence. So, what I did was to create a main axon of my topic in the center of the poster and at the sides of the topic to deconstruct the ideas.

I then presented my idea and my research and I took very positive feedback. Reflecting on the outcome of this unit, I would say that it was an interesting topic and the research was well structured. It was very important to me that I deal with a philosophical subject and I came up with ideas from the past to the present and also potential futuristic scenarios.
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