Monday 13th
Chris Alden, Ania, Michael
Nicholas, Hana, Jeff
Chris Allick
Guests:
Rita King and Josuha Fouts
Joanne McNeil, also here
Wed 15th (3:30)
Aaron, MMC, Candice
Luis & Patrick
Minette, Sebastian, Poram
Guests:
Sherri Wasserman, Thinc Design
Tarikh Korula, Uncommon Projects
Charles Pax, MakerBot
Notes on final paper & presentation (thanks Patrick)
GROUP 1: Chris Allick, Michael E, Liesje, Ania, Sebastian, Candice, Aaron, Poram
You are reading excerpts from The Big Con, by David Maurer, which I’ll hand out in class.
Response questions:
In email: What is the most interesting element of a successful con, for you, and why?
In class: Be prepared to explain to the group the elements of a successful con and outline the basic procedure, the players, and techniques.
GROUP 2: Minette, Jeff, MMC, Luis, Patrick, Chris Alden, Hana, Nicholas.
You are are reading short pieces about hoaxes and impostors. There’s one handout, plus links below. Read at least one hoax and one impostor.
Hoaxes:
PT Barnum’s account of the Feejee Mermaid hoax
The Mechanical Turk / Automaton Chess Player
Wikipedia actually does this justice. [Note: You can skip the section on “popular culture” and what follows.]
Impostors:
Frederic Bourdain
Ferdinand Waldo Demara (HANDOUT)
Response Questions:
In email: What is one technique in hoaxes or imposture that you find especially devious and interesting, and tell me why.
In class: Be prepared to explain the environment, players, technique, and apprehension of one of the hoaxes to the group for discussion; likewise, be prepared to report on one impostor and their story, technique, special skills and how they got busted to the group for discussion.
Reading:
Handout, Ch 3 & 10 from Method in Madness.
Response questions:
Please note and explain something you find especially interesting and something you find confusing or questionable. Also briefly note your thoughts on how the idea of delusional perception could be useful in manipulating the experience of authenticity.
Initial project ideas due in writing and for class discussion (see previous post for more detail).
So you have it all crystal clear, in one place, here is the schedule of final projects milestones, including classtime devoted to discussion. These are in the main Nov-Dec syllabus, as well, integrated with readings/guests.
Nov 8: Group brainstorming
Nov 15: INITIAL PROJECT IDEAS DUE for workshop discussion. This should be a short written explanation of the project, goals, anticipated challenges. Hopes, dreams, etc. You’ll get feedback in class and in writing from me.
Nov 29: FINAL PROJECT PLAN DUE with workshop in class. Written project plan revised based on previous feedback, plus step by step approach and concrete plan for field testing of the project.
YOU SHOULD HAVE ALSO STARTED MAKING BY NOW!
Dec 6: FINAL PROJECT, FIRST ITERATION DUE, including documentation of project, successes, failures, your field testing and your plans for second iteration based on what you learned.
Dec 13: Final project presentations in class, group 1
Dec 15: Final project presentations in class, group 2
Dec 16, 9AM: Final project documentation/field writeup due as a PDF in my email.
This deadline is 100% ironclad. If you don’t turn in your work by the deadline, you won’t get a grade, because I have to turn in grades.
Guests:
Eyal Ohana
Laura Greig
Project ideas discussion
Guest: Heather Knight (first part of class)
Reading:
This week, you’ll work in teams of two. Each team will read a different scholarly study (or 2 if they’re short) on an aspect of humanoid robotics. In class you and your partner will present what you’ve read to the rest of the class for discussion. Plan on about 5-7 minutes to present.
Part A: reading response (one for each team). Note one useful finding in what you’ve read, and one question that you feel the article did not answer, or a further question that the article made you want to find an answer for.
Part B: presenting to class. You’ll need to report on these elements:
-The researchers’ questions
-The researchers’ findings
-Their testing methods–what they did and interesting ways they found to elicit useful responses from their test subjects.
-Your assessment of their methods and findings.
Teams: [article PDFs will be posted here on Tues pm]
Chris Allick and MMC
>Hey, I’m over here
Video observation elicits motor interference
Chris Alden and Poram
All robots are not created equal
Exploring the aesthetic range for humanoid robots
LV and Aaron
Robots in the wild
Making robots emotion-sensitive
Nicholas and Patrick
Intersubjectivity in human-agent interaction
Minette and Ania
Nonverbal intimacy as a benchmark for human-robot interaction
Eliciting information from people with a gendered humanoid robot
Michael and Jeff
Mentalizing to non-human agents by children
Social interaction between robots, avatars, and humans
Liesje and Candice
Emotional movements in social games with robots
Robots as embodied beings
Sebastian and Hana
What is human?
1. Your short paper assignment is due. I handed out the assignment in class, and here’s the doc:
FR_assign_2
2. Reading: We’ve talked about the nuances of humanness, animacy, sentience (more on that with robots!), and this week we’re considering the distinction between alive and dead. You’re reading two chapters from Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, Zombies, Vampires and Philosophy (handout). I also encourage you to watch a Zombie or Vampire movie this week, but it’s not required.
Response questions:
–The authors are using various pop cultural representations of the condition of “undeadness” to think about humanness and personhood.
–What are some of their criteria and distinctions that you find useful in thinking about what ‘aliveness’ might mean in the context of the illusion of authenticity–and why?
–Are there criteria or distinctions that you radically disagree with or find inadequate–and why?
3. Take a quick look at Aram‘s site. His work will enrich our discussion in a few weeks when we start talking about unreal and real environments.
Your reading is Chapters 2, 3 & 4 of Boyer’s Religion Explained. It’s about 110 pages–don’t leave it for the night you come back from break!
Response questions:
-Does any of this blow your mind? If so, cite one particular concept and why.
-What do you think about the methods of evolutionary psychology Boyer is drawing on (inference systems). You can respond with your instinctual reaction, and/or your informed opinion if you’ve read more on evo-psych or the primary sources he cites. Just be sure to separate the two. Let’s get this part out in the responses to me, and I’ll try to respond back. That way we can focus on the ideas he’s offering for interpreting behavior and cognition
-How does Boyer’s work influence your notion of how authentic human-ish interactions might be characterized, and what might promote feelings of authenticity to the participants in an interactions?
IMPORTANT NOTE: Next month, class will meet on Friday 11/19 instead of the following Monday 11/22. This is so that we can get a play test and visit from Chris Hecker, game designer extraordinare–who created a game called Spy Party that directly bears on our class work.
We ran out of time the last couple of weeks before we really had a chance to sum up, so I wanted to give you a few notes to keep in mind regarding definitions of authenticity and the utility of the concept of the uncanny. Please add your thoughts in the comments or email me with questions you’d like to discuss more in class.
Authenticity
We’re firmly in the world of perception here, so there’s subjective experience to be taken into account. There is also the idea of a ‘working consensus’ in a group in terms of experiencing authenticity. We are also finding that experiences and triggers of authenticity are very context-specific, so in your own work, it’s going to matter a lot what context you’re in before you can establish what an authentic experience would be. That said, here are some of the questions and vectors to keep in mind.
What are the triggers and signifiers of an authentic experience or representation? What destroys the illusion? We’re trying investigate the things that trigger the experience of authenticity so that we can create or manipulate it. That’s a major theme to keep track of as the semester progresses.
About the Real
Distinguishing the question of authenticity from the question of objective reality or verifiability. So, one definition of authenticity is that which does not raise questions of objective reality or verifiability. It’s more encompassing than the simple suspension of disbelief. It’s the suspension of reality-testing.
About truth
Examining whether a statement, a fact, an identity, a place, or an object is what it purports to be. Can a lie/untruth/error/false appearance be authentic? Is authenticity in this case the definition of successful falseness?
We have a set of distinctions around authenticity, they can be binary or exist on a continuum:
Synthetic vs. natural
True vs. false/lie/error
Dream vs. awake/real
Imagined vs. real
Randomness and unpredictability as hallmarks of authenticity
We talked about a few different vectors of experience–physicality, emotionality, identity, perception—regarding places, persons, objects, relationships and systems.
There’s an interesting complexity here. Take for example the synthetic/natural distinction. If you think about synthetic plants, for example, that are convincing enough for you to think they are real, then they may be defined (in our terms) as authentic. However, you only encounter the question of their authenticity when you discover that they’re not actually living plants. I’m thinking of Roxy [last name]’s work.
We also want to understand authenticity as a kind of suspension of self-awareness or self-consciousness, as in Remainder. A fluid experience. The character’s drive to recreate and repeat his authentic moments is depicted (among other things) as a desire to experience himself in the complete present, without meta-cognition. In the novel, this comes to be linked to PTSD. For our purposes this is useful in that highly charged (though not necessarily traumatic) emotional or physical moments, with extremely heightened perceptions, may be experienced as ‘authentic’ or when a person ‘felt most real.’
A final question to keep in mind:
When does authenticity matter? I think in every situation it’s important to run the “does it matter” filter.
Uncanny
We’ve got the distinction between identifying the experience of the uncanny from the causes of that feeling.
The feeling of the uncanny is highly subjective.
Freud’s definition:
-A subset of frightening wherein the feeling leads back to what is recognized and long familiar
-What ought to have remained hidden or secret, but has come to light
-Uncertainty with respect to reality or animacy is not sufficient to produce uncanny feelings (“intellectual uncertainty”)
-Subset of frightening things in which something repressed recurs. For Freud, this means that what recurs is the thing that has been repressed, and that’s where the sense of familiarity comes from.
-Uncanny experience occurs specifically when infantile complexes which have been repressed are revived, or when ‘primitive beliefs’ (magic, coincidence) seem suddenly re-activated and are used to interpret the world. [We agreed with this the least]
Some useful ideas for our work:
“The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.”
Our uncertainty as to whether we are privy to delusions or the fantastic (in the story, the first two parts are letters to and from Lothario and Clara, and Clara explicitly asserts that it’s all in his head as result of the trauma of his father’s death). I also also talked about the realistic system/fiction with one fantastical element included in the “physics” of reality in the invented world as “uncanny fiction,” like Saramago or Murakami.
Doubling is a way of revealing the secrets, for example, in Sandman, the doubling not only of Coppelius/Coppola and that character with the father. Doubling is also a form of recurrence. Another form of doubling involves place rather than person. For Freud, it becomes uncanny when it is involuntary.
We discussed the question of whether fear needed to be involved, and proposed that the uncanny may be experienced in an anxious state, rather than a fearful one. I’ve got some more information for you on the difference between fear and anxiety, and I’ll fill you in at our next class meeting.
We discussed the idea that at some level the uncanny is experienced when there is a break in perception, a perceptual shift of some kind. We’ve got the idea that repetition and doubling are strong themes in both the sense of the authentic and of the uncanny (from Remainder and from Freud—and incidentally, McCarthy is a big Freud aficionado).
What’s useful about the uncanny is that it’s something we can play with, that it affects a person’s perception—at least momentarily—and causes reality questions to come into play. The uncanny is a moment of familiarity and the revealing of something hidden (whether or not it’s repressed castration anxiety is not a question we need to resolve here). The hidden thing may not be the revelation of a fact, necessarily, but a pattern or a type of perception that makes us question something fundamental for a moment. So thinking about déjà vu: the feeling of repetition, which is itself a sort of repressed return, calls into question our grip on time and space, the physics of experience. That whole ‘glitch in the matrix’ explanation is so incredibly satisfying—because it’s a plausible explanation (within the logic of the film) for something we have no explanation for but is an authentic, uncanny experience. What do you think the ‘hidden’ thing is in our reaction to the uncanny valley dwelling robots? Might be something to do with our understanding of humanness.
You’re reading “Self-Reflective Consciousness and the Projectable Self,” Metcalfe and Kober. It’s a handout.
Same response questions: one helpful/elucidating thing, one confusing or disgreement.
Your first field assignment is due SUNDAY 10/3 AT 9PM. I’m handing out the assignment instructions in class, and will post them here later tonight.
Kio Stark/ ITP 