Seminar 1 / 27th Sep / Tracy Lannon / ideas

Following the Lecture introducing us to the Cybernetic Self brief, I pitched my initial ideas to my course leader Tracy Lannon and seminar group. Talking about my ideas and hearing ideas of others was a great way to gain direction towards the cybernetic self brief. After the seminar, my focus towards the brief had expanded to an array of directions to experiment with, a lot more than I had to begin with.

To begin the session we all participated in a little ice breaker task, as we had not seen each other for a while over the summer holidays. We each had a sticky note to write down what word best describes yourself and what world would others use to best describe you. I wrote 'happy' for my self and 'random' for what my friends would say about me. then we shared what we had wrote with the class and I discovered nearly all of the sticky notes had really diverse descriptions of people, which was interesting to find out.

One idea I have about the Cybernetic Self project is the idea of perception and the inquisition that you never actually know who you are talking to over the web. Funnily enough, after the lecture I was scrolling through my news feed on Facebook and I came across this illusive image of two faces. when you look closely you can see a man in the foreground, however step back or squint and you see a woman. The idea behind this image is to express what you see when you are drunk, hence the pretty girl from far away or squinting and the emergence of a man as you look in greater detail. I think this illusive image would work great to express the dangers of talking to strangers over the internet. The illusive side of the image will show two different people to explain the false perception, is the person really who they are behind their profile picture. I like this idea and I will research this in greater detail.

In addition, I also thought of an idea around gaming vs reality. Are hard core gamers viewing the real world differently to non gamers. I could research around this idea, as to how the brain could be effected. Maybe a gamers brain could be programmed to see the worst in people and create a sense of social difficulties in the real world. Or maybe their brains may have been hardwired to have greater reaction times, due to intense focus and coordination when gaming. I am sure their are many theories to research about this situation and it would be interesting to see where I could take this.