Good afternoon, and welcome or welcome back to the forum for our second panel here today. My name is Dr. Mona and I'm one of the creators of first festival. So within the scope of this year's edition, as you probably have already heard, we explore how emotions affect parent empathy, our challenge to contemporary technologists today, and we'll discuss diplomacy today. cetaceans. Starting from rain away instructors are failing. And this emphasis on life experience and effective consciousness. We want to explore how this notions connected today's technologies are failing. For instance, whatever systems and infrastructures allow our users to become more aware, to feel more or relate differently to each other. This afternoon, and we will be discussing even how our capacity to affect and be affected changes within today's sensory environments. The panel is organized in collaboration with Winchester School of Arts, and will be moderated by Amber. Ryan is a professor of global art and politics at the Winchester School of Art University of Southampton and is director of the activities of media and technology research at the major School of Arts. His research areas it will create a theory visual culture and religion, aesthetics, critical military studies, architecture, sensory perception and knowledge formation. Ryan has two forthcoming books and pilot among the power and tech labs and zero degrees C. Please wait on line managers.
Thank you very much. On behalf of Winchester school or University of Southampton, my many colleagues there want to thank transmedia again for allowing us to collaborate in such a productive and broken manner. And we'd also like to take just a minute because definitely and Christopher dancing worked incredibly hard year round. And they often don't get a chance for
us to provide a proper sense of appreciation, I'd like to do that.
I'm going to just say a few words and introduce the panelists and they will come up without me appearing in between every q&a at the end, you'll have to put up with my appearance there. Amongst other phenomena Raymond Williams, structures of field refers to that which is emergence, and coding, and not yet ready to be articulated fully and rational form. Williams was roundly castigated for the terms badness and lack of rigor, but the looseness of the concept and its performance proves useful as a supplement or a precursor to or swerve around current effect theory, a way to render more complex, nuanced and determined by macro forces, the emotive world we occupy
that occupies us
more fueling than thought Williams wrote, they were nonetheless structures operational in the world that provided quote, patterns of impulses, restraints, and sometimes it's hard to imagine a world in which we strengths operates. Constraints most certainly, but restraint so beautifully in a starship nine is people acting with and from restraints. It's really extraordinary. reworking our brain to tune into patterns of impulses with strings and phantoms also means reworking our brain to different rhythms and moralities. speculative design is one way of doing this, of envisioning potential futures that can help us align various trajectories and organize them differently. As George Carlin once said, electricity is just organized lighting structures the feeling or means of getting at the complex. excrescence of the presence and are tainted or inflected understanding of it. a philosopher who had long connections with Berlin, in a period, not unlike our own in specific ways, wrote about the synchronicity of temporalities and the power of the non synchronous, and did sell in ways that anticipate we insist formulations. According to current Spurlock in his 1930s work, heritage, a lot of times, capitalist modernity as it ensnared Europe at that moment in the 1930s might define that present as the most advanced economy, but it did not account for the entirety of contemporary experience, any Crescent block still contains modes of life that belong to earlier times, as well as visualizations and formulations of times, both of which we various groups and nine synchronous relations to the present. There is dangerous for he claimed for oppressive regimes are able to draw upon cultural resources that should rightfully belong to the left. And there is potential in his condition, the task rights block was to release those elements, even if the non contemporaneous configuration, which are capable of the version and transformation, namely those hostiles, capitalism, homeless in it, and to remount them for functioning in a different connection. The power of the non synchronous resources of the past lies in the fact that they remain incomplete, unresolved, and hence lastingly. And hence lastingly subversive in February. They are the gold bearing rubble of the preventive feature, all of which for us in the present, is not to suggest that phenomenon reducible to an economic or even technological determinism, but merely to knowledge and insights, macro forces work at a granular level of computing an experience or structures a feeling and what we might do in the face of it. To grab this gold bearing level, it's too critical with the etymology of this term as the term crisis as well, considering the indo European recross, which refers to sifting to lead to having the capacity to separate the chaff from the grain, discard that which is nourish and kind of go into that which does. This is also the project and reworking the grain as address participants on this panel, those participants as you know hyphema and Sony sensor hyperlapse two ran a workshop on Wednesday I titled my mouse is that an interview? In the most recent edition of Eclipse magazine neural is a speculative design studio and think tank founded in 2014. I kinda like Dr. Franco and joined by Ashley Backus in 2016. Combine interests and backgrounds in architecture, neuroscience, design and creative writing. The studio has been collaborating on a continuing project, neuro speculative afrofuturism, which will speak to today. This is a platform for open ended narrative and VR exploration. It maps works at the intersection of art, technology, science, and future. Tony Sampson is a critical theorist with an interest in philosophies of media technology and cultures. His publications include the spam box, or edited etc. For Rica, my colleague and good friend at Winchester school virality contagion theory in the age of networks, the assemblage brain sense making in neuro culture, and I know that hyperlapse has been carrying around a mocked up copy of this so expensive question study
and aspect in social media motion mediation, anxiety and contagion. His next book is called the sleepwalkers guide to social media which will be published by poverty crisis lately. In addition to his publisher attorneys, the hosted organizer, we affected social media international conferences in East London, and co founder of the public engagement initiative, the cultural engine research group. He currently works as a leader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London. So now I'd like to welcome
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for having us. Since this is our biggest audience, we're glad to take a selfie with you guys.
If y'all want to say hello Okay,
cool. Thank you. Thank you.
Great way to start things up. So I'm Carmen. And I'm Ash.
And we wanted to introduce you guys to some of our work, as well as talk to you about how we're very inspired by artists and designers who take an interdisciplinary approach and develop their own design language, which is why we are paying homage to Virgil Allah in our ever evolving our own practice in our own studio.
We're also interested in a way that he is unafraid to look across disciplines and to really orient himself within different artistic practices, design practices, theories, in order to manifest his works. We try to do the same thing and how we approach the projects that we take.
So just to give you a little introduction of who we are, we are four core members right now collaborating with more than 20 other individuals. I'm Carmen, I'm from San Francisco and Cozumel, Mexico, as your Tom call is from Turkey, and she's an architect. But yeah, I was an engineer in my previous life.
I'm Ashraf is Clark. In a previous life, I was a molecular biologist studying stem cell research for a really long time. And now I made the transition to writing and thinking critically about neuroscience, virtual reality, systems of belief and speculation on our future.
And we've recently started working with Romy who's coming from a background in psychology, and she's from Egypt and from the UK. So as we are trying to develop a design language, we're looking, we're trying to look at threads that go through all of our projects. And we'll give you guys a bit of context around the work that we do, talking about our project nurse circular path for feminism, as well as our views that we're working on. But we like to think about how to translate between realities, whether that's a virtual reality or our physical reality, whether it's my reality in the United Kingdom, which is where our studios base now, or if we're trying to communicate and translate through realities that exist all over the world. And that allows us to collaborate between different disciplines, we get to experiment between mediums, with backgrounds in architecture and design, we like to be physical, but we also have a familiarity with the digital. And this also allows us to develop our own aesthetic by it, and by doing this, we find that it's quite empowering. And we hope that our example can then empower others, incorporating a radical critical and plural design approach, looking at the speculative and creating alternative visions, while also having a lot of fun.
I'm going to talk about a project that we made called her a second Afro feminism. We debuted in 2016, at Sundance Film Festival at New Frontier.
And it's a project
that looks across four different disciplines. So virtual reality, neuroscience, cycling, object design and installation. And we wanted to look at what a world would look like if black women were purveyors of culture through euroscience. So we created this fantastical world where we reimagined the hair salon as a brain salon. So you go into our VR experience, and you think you're going to get your hair done, and you're actually going to get your brain optimized. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the different parts of the project. It started with the object. So Pam and I were living together in New York at this time, it was a really hot summer. It was also the summer of 2016. When all that was coming to class, our media feed lines, everything that was on the news on our Twitter headlines, were talking about the extrajudicial killing of black men at the hands of the police. And so this was our lived reality. And we were both doing something very different at the time. But we felt like we had something to say about it. And me as you know, being someone who lives in black on every day and Carmen being one of my oldest friends. We've known each other for 14 years. So being in New York being and texting, we found that we wanted to talk about it. And so we started ideas and was Project and then we call it Ajay. And we're like, Hey, we want to do this thing. Let's make it let's do it. So started with these objects. And they're all around themes of security, protection, visibility, and recontextualizing. So as you can see here, this is a render of some of the objects that we made, and that we have on display when we show this piece inside of my physical installation. So starting with the transparency on the screen, and why we've been transparent sunscreen is, I don't know if any of you have had this experience before, but because sunscreen on and you don't rub it in properly, and it does color's your skin. Well, for people that have darker skin, it's really hard to you know, use this product that is meant to protect you and also be able to step outside with, you know, normal exam, so you have like white residue all over your face. So started there, of thinking about design solutions and interventions and thinking about things that should be considered that usually aren't in the design process, and then industry and within the industry. And then from there, it went on to us thinking more broadly about everyday objects and how we can embed those objects with technological capabilities to protect and augment ourselves. So we created an earring in collaboration with one of our good friends and artists, Michelle Cortez, and they're called the Ruby camp earrings. So there are video and audio label that are modeled after the door knocker era that's pervasive in hip hop culture. So you put these earrings on, you can start recording with the touch of a button. And
any time
or just any sort of altercation where there are a million variables because we see when we check our phone and it's become a weapon. People know that you're reporting in, in situations where there is a misbalance of power, having your phone out and recording the situation can put you and everyone else around you in danger. So we wanted to embed these capabilities into an everyday object, we capture footage and then upload it to the cloud. And you know, hopefully, sometime in the future, we'll be able to have a database, a searchable database of repeat offenders. And then we created a visor, that the material is like a mirror. So you put it on, yes made
dichro it is a microaggression deflecting advisor, we collaborated with AV screener.
And something that's interesting about the visor was we This was the first moment when we started bringing the physical objects into the digital world, giving all of our avatars visors. So that we could, so that we could learn not and make their faces. But that too, we could have a large discussion around our own privacy and creating digital safe spaces within these virtual worlds. Another piece that we collaborated with Adam Harvey's will help with this. And this is a low, low tech capture surveillance textile. And it is meant to obfuscate the face by giving a lower confidence score to your face than faces on the textile that will be viewed by a computer vision algorithm. And then the most speculative objects that we designed are the Octavia electrodes. And this is where we started incorporating the neuro speculative apps.
So Octavia electrodes are named after Octavia Butler, you know, we were reading a lot of Octavia Butler during this time and thinking about some of her theories and how they are embedded into the current culture that we live in. And so we reimagined a technology that exists in neuroscience called transcranial stimulation. And without an interest in actually wanting to recreate this technology, as so many people in these biohacking movements or quantified self movements are using consumer grade devices in order to you know, give a low level stimulation to your brain and you get into flow states are readily are thinking that that is somehow optimizing them. We wanted to be in conversation with people that were doing that and see if we can stimulate something to that effect in virtual reality. And so, this is where we created our Ural cosmetology lab. So in it we reimagined these electrodes as advice that comes down you
sit in the chair and and it can be also your brain be incorporated into your brain hair extensions so that you can access it with your brain techniques because the the way that it exists now can be limited to Anybody who has maybe bigger hair, we've seen it. Similarly with the Oculus visor where somebody who had people who designed the device probably didn't have much hair and had really great vision. So we're trying to remix some of these existing
technologies. Yeah, we've lost several headsets to that and encounter people's girls. And so, aside from that our work is about design provocations, right? We want people to think about how you're designing something and who you're designing it for. And so in the piece, we drop you into the speculative world, and you're embodied in the body of a young black woman, and you go through this experience, where you need our main character, her name is Greg, she's a world renowned neuroscientist who had to go into exile because of some of the technologies that she created. And this woman here is her name is nyla. She's a venture capitalist who's funded versus enterprises. So it's this whole story that we imagined world building. And beyond anything else, we're trying to show empowering images of black woman in VR, as its evolving as it's becoming more ingrained in popular culture and mainstream media, because we all want it to be like film where stories are more representative of a wider demographic or left to the margins, and with a stride in trying to find a place in it.
And we had the experience that we were ready to build this game. And we started looking on turbosquid, and like free 3d libraries, and we couldn't find any beautiful representations of black and brown women that we thought could exist in our game. So we decided to make our own. And so in this experience, you in a physical installation, we invite you into a hair salon, and then you sit down in in the space and we give you the Oculus, or the VR headset, and you go into this digital hair salon, you meet these researchers, and you have a simulation of a optimization session. And in this optimization session, you go through a new architecture, a new world that isn't defined by the physics of our reality, can you go through the mirror and use your body
so we wanted to play with embodiment and disembodiment. And so when you fly through this new vision sequence, where the physics of the world isn't adherent to the physics of reality, you have a sense that you're looking at an old world falling into the ether. So old media representations of that have been shown about black women and black women's bodies are falling into the lava. And then you get down to a Pantheon and you see a pantheon of new representations of black women. And then you come back out of it, and you're back into the lab, and you've been changed in some sort of way, you know, your hair is different. And you look over there, and they give you a method.
So and this is also available, we wanted to make this accessible, you know, we want creators to be making VR and to see themselves in virtual reality. And we were also using this virtual reality as a test to see if we can reduce prejudice and bias or if we can inspire young young people and young creatives to see if they have agency in space,
and to have a cross cultural conversations about anti blackness because anti blackness really is transnational. And you know, we can create a safe space in order to talk about these things and to bring to light things that are not only going on in the US, but are also you know, sort of happening abroad as well. And, you know, we want to create a place where people can talk and learn and have conversations
around these things. And historically, that's been a hair salon. It's been a place for political and social activation. So we wanted to create that space in the in the very delicate fabric that we're living in now. So here you can see one of the installations that we had at Tribeca. We also want to show you, the team that we worked with, we came from all over we have many different backgrounds. But we all had a real passion for this story and for creating something something different. And so we'll show you a little teaser of the piece. So not quite sure how much time we have, but we'll try to rush through the rest of it so we can get to the next speaker. But we also want to show you guys a little bit of some other work that we're doing. Because we're talking about being designers that can help change minds. The we collaborated with the National Safety Commission and missing pieces on a national campaign that will talk about the opioid epidemic. And this project was at a very different scale. Rather than me trying to reach hundreds of 1000s of people, this project ended up reaching millions of people. So in this shoe
in this project, it was really bad. For the surgeries,
I thought the scaffolding injured my back
first thing was medication plan for pain. It was just like,
read the script,
put a bandaid on it, and I have friends I actually gave away money, less medications, we just kind of swap or if one doctor denies you, you go to a different doctor,
I went to my house, I was taking her pills. It was good when I was taking that which was mentally physically exhausting trying to pretend that something is nice.
Okay, so there's something that I would like to show you.
Every one of those little jokes represent a person we lost.
Okay, so this was a quite different project. For us. It was proposed by a retrovirus in pieces. And we collaborated with Tucker Walsh to do the film direction, but we designed the space. The main goal was have it be a modular installation that could represent 22,000 individuals. And we die each year from opioid related deaths, specifically, prescription pills. And how we augmented This was by creating an infinity effect and talking about how this this problem and the stigma is much larger than just prescriptions that it reaches not just to people in the United States, but really across the world. So we wanted to divide the space into three parts one where we could do a data visualization where we could have a live running CNC machine that every 22 minutes was carving a face, which is the rate at which someone dies from related death. We also wanted to create rooms for family memory rooms, there were three individuals whose stories were being highlighted. We wanted to incorporate the familiarity of medicine cabinets, and what the and the severity of what's inside of them. And then we had the large wall. And in our our most recent project we're working on is called the anxious ocean and the moon Vader's. And this is a new commission that we worked on as a graphic piece where we are spec you know, thinking about and talking about the post Anthropocene are the post human world. So our story to start this experience is over a short period of time the oceans have been saturated with the human leftovers and their genetic footprints. These DNA carrying plastics permeated into micro organisms transferring a human like traits into the aquatic residence. The marine life is now in an anxious ocean infused with human consciousness, the anxious ocean and the Moon Bay, there's depicts a Day in this post human world. So in this, we're hoping to incorporate the anxieties that we have and potentially see if we can, again use VR in order to change people's behaviors to change their minds by telling an ego womanish story about the post human world. So that's it, thank you so much.
Grab a copy of selfie put
on a mobile phone.
Okay, I'd like to begin by saying thank you to Ryan and Lucy from Winchester for helping organize this with festival organizers. That amazing conference, I get emails from people reminding me to check in at the airport. And that kind of details. Amazing stuff. Thank you very much. So what I thought I'd do is try to broadly address some of the things in the conference itself, and this particular session. So we might have a conference feed on emotion feeding effect. And then the idea of reworking, what we just talked about working with the right kind of broad approach to
how
we conceive of the brain, how the brain image as you can see, both in recent years, but there's been some interesting sort of twists and paradigm shifts involved here. So you're going to quite broadly approach this in this talk.
Okay, so, yeah, before the 1990s, I'm not gonna go back too far, we're gonna talk about so before 1990s, we would talk roughly being in what we might describe as the classic cognitive theorists or frame of the brain. So you might be familiar with some of these diagrams. In short, it's a kind of metaphor for the brain as a computer, or computer brain, if you like. It's specifically about brain which is an information processor. It has a number of characteristics to it, you have information in information out, the processor in the middle works on representations, there's some kind of storage memory storage. So you can see the thought of analogy between the computer and the brain. So you might ask, why flexible in the 1990s? You know, how do we address the kind of themes of this conference? Really, that model was bereft of any mention of emotion of when emotions were included? Things our feelings, our emotions were kind of described as Noisy, noisy, messy, irrational. So we know that things have changed greatly. With some sense of how having no emotions makes you more rational, that helps stop the character don't fight softly, it would be a rational relation. Right. So things begin to change, you know, your job keeping is quite broad. I've been drawn to neuroscientists popular neuroscientist who kind of make this point. There's obviously a lot work behind this. But we can characterize this sort of shift from a cognitive frame into a new paradigm, right? We call this the emotional term, by looking at the work of one on one hand of Joe, Joe's a guy and kind of a design scaring the hell out of rats by all accounts. So by sharing, he made this high correlation between the breakup of the retailer and the processing of fear and in choices that kind of upstream to more refined thinking such things as reps making choices and decisions. Yeah. So similarly, Antonio Damasio, who's probably the most popular and well known person, at least, to came up with a somatic marker thesis, which I'm sure again, a lot of you are familiar with, but is the idea of in some way or effect is kind of registered in the body and again, is involved in upstream downstream movement from bodily, emotional, affective 3d relationships that are directly linked to decision decisions. Sure. This is cognition. So you can see here but quite the bottom how Damasio starts distancing himself and this work from the old property paradigm, emotions of feelings may not be the truth is in the best view of reason at all, they may be a mesh is very network. So that's quite likely over the shape of that new paradigm. So from my perspective, it's been really interesting the way that this work has influenced what I see myself as which is kind of new new materialist ethic theories. I know DiMaggio, particularly not just these contra Cartesian approach, but he's got alliances with Spinoza. And obviously, he's had a big impact and validated in some respects, on the ideas from the theories to have a theory. So you're just looking at the first two books along from Patricia Clark's effect. It's the dominant record references, the mess that I see over there. Certainly a great sequence, I think, read epic books in this area. They have direct references in there to Damasio and of course, others, I bought cow's milk on there, because that is really based on a kind of theory of the non conscious as established dementia, but there's a different difference between apple and the apple two that I'll be able to talk about a little bit more. Okay, so what we have really here is this kind of these ideas for brain science of giving some sort of validation, for an idea that asset exists in some kind of non conscious way. So not unconscious, the non conscious. Yeah, I'm interested in the way that these theories are not influenced or the way they they relate to pro social ethic theories. You know, from the beginning through to person really interested in bipolar, the impulsive decision act, acts as a kind of, you know, impulsive robber being fought. In fact, if you read some of those new streets, publishing this kind of a hesitation, but comes at some point after those impulses have kicked in. Your Whitehead simply looks an aesthetic, but ontology
is a little sacred spot. On waIking, which is you, we think that that cognition is like a command post, but actually, it's just a mere foothold, in reality on the process of reality. And another great book, of course, you do finally run lawyer who sees perpetual perceptual reality that kind of caught me probably about a secondary to a primacy of actually serving your absolute sensation. So you can see how these kind of old workings of the non conscious self to correlate with the suffered Damasio does, and it feeds into effect theory. Okay, just to make a little bit faster, there's not a straightforward idea of what an unconscious is, I don't know if you're familiar with with packhouse latest book, there's a rather kind of lively take on new materialism as a criticism of new materialism. So I think you could probably draw a line between these two books, in our personal unconscious, one case, would be still I think, working within that complex theoretical frame time, we could probably make something like this. But our idea of ethics is always going to be filtered through cognition, always going through that sort of consciousness. Without consciousness, we don't experience it as critical of new materialism for the reason that really she's playing tonight ignores consciousness pretty much all together. So they are interested in but there's a wider reading to be done on that subject. What I wanted to look at this, this paradigm shift is emotional term, from a design perspective, relating to the panel itself. We do this by looking at some of the design theories populism fears of Donald Donald was interesting, because he was the first self declared user experience design consultant. He started off very much squarely in cognitive science and cognitive HCI, human computer interaction, if obviously spoken in 1988, the design of everyday things, maybe some of you are familiar with this. But what is interesting games on diagrams are the non sexy spoken others who have gone on very much working in that old kind of cognitive brain model. So we have the world itself is shoveled purely through perception, that perception, well, that's the diagram there, where it goes through a whole series of things that involve choice and actually, we're really clubbing that information processing model of the brain. My favorite one is the one below this, which is the designer's mental model, which roughly translates to color representation and sort of sorted memory is ongoing, has to match the user's needs. So, you know, in a kind of educational way, because as users as designers, we think about what the user is experiencing. With some students, we do some interesting kind of ideas around, asking them what's in the box, we say, imagine that there's an elephant in the box. And then you ask them to maybe draw here, or imagine it in some way to get back on a way in which representation might be saw in the brain. And of course, they will see similar things. So that for me the whole kind of words about exactly what is he was sort of fleshing out or tracing in the brain in some way. But that's a mental one. So by 2003, we can see how long references again, Damasio directly, but it's kind of shifted, he's taken into this new new paradigm, if you like, emotional term, and he publishes a book called emotional design. And we get a new diagram. I this is really interesting, because if whatsoever diagram, this is dominant, as I was saying, this diagram here, the visual always rules, visceral always dictates what happens at the level of behavior and cognition, reflection. So that's Norman's point. And it's really, you know, absolutely tied into the emotional brain thesis how the brain processes emotional experiences, is where is that right? So
that's my actual interest is going a little bit kind of into the world of HCI and HCI, research, human computer interaction, and are interested in a kind of political side of this more. So my idea or take on human computer interaction research is really it's about getting a brain to work or getting a body to start off with, by putting it together and putting the brain to work efficient way. Right. So we can broadly talk about kind of three paradigms here, which map or hinder the shift in terms of brains. So where is the brain in the first paradigm? Well, we won't call it the ergonomic paradigm. So management of efficient human machine couplings on the machine coupling inside the brain doesn't really fit in very much. I use some stuff like Greg sheet, you know, we looked at before this factory and said that, really, the brain was quite you know, better than muscle memory, is that sort of my mechanical habit is captured by that kind of work. And you can see that that trace, and there's a direct link between, they call it cyber risk theory work of early ergonomics. When we get into the cognitive paradigm, which maps on exactly to that computer, brain, bicycle, we start to see things our perception, attention, memory being put to work in models used by HCI HCI, researchers, and then more recently, anyone who kind of works in this area, either even in industry or in academia, you will notice that it was recently referred to human computer interaction increasing now we're referring to user experience. UX, right? It's a big buzzword, certainly industry in London, I'm not too sure about Germany, but it's huge. That the UX consultant is a big design design job in the UK. So yeah, I think this to the growth of experience, the industry's definition of new concept, of course, this couple of references here, but, you know, experience industries and make to company experience economy, which you might be familiar with. Alvin Toffler a long, long time ago talked about, you know, not bad manufactured goods, or even all the services were pre programmed experiences, rather profound thing about the cause psychotics dominating industries of the future. Certainly marketing has been a great a great business seller in 1981 of my students found the digital review of this kind of desire to explore the aesthetics of a consumption experience, to try to get into that level of experience rather than cognition. Following a fridge swap, we can see how this this kind of feeds into what he calls a cultural surface of capitalism, sort of adapted it to the cultural circuits of experienced capitalism. And we see how the ideas of neuroscience particularly this emotional brain thing starts to feed a lot of attacks around you know, consumer branding, marketing, things like brain foods, the most awful titles, you can really imagine buying great how to push up the Brian coin gray, because all these books are complete crap. But the point is, this is 50 on the idea that all this stuff becomes rehearsed, the more it becomes a norm. If you're in London, like iced coffee industry, sort of by seminars, and this these diagrams, these books, regurgitated over again becomes part of the rehearsal of the service. Do you take the bet in in lots of other different ways as well. This is known as diagram. This was a piece of software by a Danish company called the eye emotions. And it was quite dedicated a user experience design research, we're working specifically on our emotions. And you just really, it's just Damasio repeating over and over again. So that's kind of the broad kind of ideas around we've seen how the brain as we could see from pop music model into an emotional model. So what I want you to do is come away, he's asked two questions to finish it off his talk. First of all, we'll be walking, right. So what can be done to a brain? And then a little bit more optimistic, and hopefully, related to some of your maps? To ask what can the brain do? So I'm going to quickly run through these because I'm not too sure how much time I've got it.
So why don't you go first, when he's putting the brain to work in terms of emotional contagion? Love, you will want to be familiar with the 2014 Facebook effort to try and make emotions go contagion go contagious. So that is one way the whole group of your solid companies now in the UK, social media marketing companies looking at the ways in which they could use emotion to fuel the reality your programming means I love this quote, do people share feelings of inflammation, low arousal emotions, such as contentment and relaxation? They use this in a viral economy of course, Cambridge analytic a shadow the whole concentration here was a behavioral science and science yet data analytics. But yeah, I don't think I watch the channel for Steam. Playing generally ticker cop series of videos really interesting stuff. Yeah, I've got time to read all this. But it's really saying that what people want to do is focus on emotions. Yeah. I don't think behavioral analytics and the personality trait stuff is is the all the story here. Yeah, it's fine. So obviously, for its Trump connection with Brexit, but are also involved in campaigns in Kenya, and Nigeria, which offer less less coverage about those in western texts. Interestingly, they go to campaigns they run there, they were running through social media campaigns, when we post these messages from the official candidate, and a whole stream of really negative violent videos working at the kind of negative thing. So if you take time to read that quote, for another thing is this idea of your addiction. This is a book, which is kind of got quite a lot of attention. last few years, about how we can produce habit forming technologies. Again, you know, this, this idea of focusing on triggering negative emotions is really key in this this text. So the author argues that you can complete we can tap into anxieties, you create habit forming, use of technology. Okay, so quickly, open your brain. This is also optimistic stuff. Okay, so yeah, a lot of these people who create this stuff, again, this was a big kind of story in technology a few few years ago, possibly about people working in Silicon Valley disconnecting, blocking, banning liberty, patrolling, preventing i o presented to the students, and they just say, well, there's no way we can do that, right? There might be some kind of level of detox, you know that this isn't gonna happen. So I think that's probably past, right. So we've also talked about reverse engineering things on the hook. So you're getting people that know their triggers know that when they're checking into those notifications, you know, that that is that anxiety, feeding kind of a design, trying to get people hooked in that particular way. more interested in going back to neuroscience, and hopefully we can discuss it and the more I work with Thomas metzinger is interesting here, we've actually got specific talks about using psychoactive drugs and neuro technologies to rewire the brain rewire the brain, in a way which we might be talking here. I'm not a big fan of Mexico, the whole idea of the brain being like a virtual reality, Plato's cave seems ridiculous. And also, the idea that there's sort of like a second level of representation or grammatical level. I don't agree that it seems Shapiro does a really good time. But anyway, the point I want to make here are forming some positive stuff is really there's a lot of stuff about filters being on or filters being off in the brain. Mexico says we want to do LSD filters off, right. And there was some research recently I made a couple days ago, where Brian sands looked at people and I see it seems to cut off information. So it stops the flow of stuff coming in. So yeah, one of these eyes kind of bugs, broad differential, what was happening to take those filters off? You know, there's different ways. I mean, talk about that, because I think in a way, that's what your work is doing with hydromax. I'm interested in so it was being on in this particular sense of experience design, especially Bratton's quote here about circular design, he talks about the muffling effects of intuitive neurological and emotional comfort zones. And I do think sometimes, yeah, they're designed to make people feel at ease and comfort in a way, quote, unquote, filters on.
Okay, just to be clear, okay. Yeah, going back to the point of the philosophy, and how can we use this stuff to actually do anything of any work? Obviously, I think it's gonna struggle. I mean, he's an interesting couple of books been released in the last couple of years. First one is, we call these aspirational fascism, which directly addresses this kind of current war we have on our cultural multiplicity, is a really interesting book, because he talks about the visceral register, in which this white working class, you know, constituent who votes for Donald Trump, for example, and we got plenty of that sort of tax in the UK as well. And I met some in the bar last night in Germany as well. Yeah, these people operate on a visceral level. But the real point, Callie makes is liberal state had this idea of refined thinking will save a day. And he talks about you more closely aligning, but refined reason thinking of work on a level with those visceral kind of registers in which people exist, right? Yeah, this stuff is now on social media is spreading, I think people are conditioned. And her kind of cycle become more than human user. They're not just the user to use the brain to simulate right, but it's a collective, non conscious, collective conscious cog in idea, but a collective non conscious is where we should possibly focus.
All right,
quite a lot to engage with and to consider and get your brains working if they weren't working previously. we've now reached that wonderful interactive stage of the event, which is called the q&a. So if you guys have some queues, they will have some A's that might in turn generate more queues? I think we have. Do we have people wandering around? Definitely. Are there microphones? Okay. Standing mics, as you can see them standing or swatting? So if somebody would like to come up and ask a question, please do so. And in the awkward interim, I will either ask a question or what I would like to do is have the panelists ask questions to each other. We have some.
Here's the markup book copy we're mentioning, actually pick this up. After hearing me on a panel with you. I thought it was
interesting thinking about neuron culture, particularly when you talk about like D materialization and spiritualization. And I'm wondering, just you know, what part of
the human collective
unconscious is trying to vastly towards dematerialization in the world that we live in.
And you know, I think just kind
of having conversations with other creators and artists and friends who have never been spiritual or whoever never had some
sort of fundamental system of belief now vacillating towards that. Is that something that you can speak a little bit, you mentioned it.
Think it's more that kind of delusion, way of getting away from territories and breaking down things. Very similar to one of the ideas and we're particularly keen to neuroscience is people like Robert Zell is a kind of a psychologist, Bruce Wexler, argue that the brain desires consonants wants to have balance. And one of the things arguing that is, particularly in the case of the Trump constituents of Brexit, you know, you Kip sidran, will probably what we need is more cognitive dissonance, you know, some sort of shock, some breakdown of those kind of belief systems. So, it's not researchers, it's more kind of breaking down, breaking down fixed ideas. There's lots of romanticism around that kind of idea about the terrorist organization. And I'm quite aware of the Nazis that they can meet. But I think probably what I see you work is an attempt to shake people out of ways of thinking. So yeah, that's, that's where I was reacting.
Yeah, we're have a provocation, you know, we really want to provoke
people to think more deeply about not only the world we live in, but also about how we can make conversations around science, art and technology, we're accessible.
More than
anything about saying something specific about the brain, or how different regions of the brain are working or saying that we're trying to target different regions of the brain, if that's what you mean, by territory, realizing different brain regions? Yeah, we want to say, take a concept or an idea in neuroscience and translate it into a story so that it sticks more in your mind more like your note based learning. You know, we're if we say the neuron or a synapse, and we tell you a story about it, then the next time you hear that word, you'll have that vision in your mind about what it is and how it functions.
And also,
and also giving that agency so having an embodied back character, we were working. We were when we were designing the piece itself, we were wondering how we if we should make this like a passive experience, but not knowing what the effects of virtual reality are, we wanted to experiment with the feeling of embodiment, and ownership over the experience. And then also that kind of as you were talking about the psychedelic experience, and losing your body, and how that also grounds The, the message or it gives more meaning to the message. Because at that point, everyone, regardless of who's in the headset, is having the same experience, whether or not they identify with the individual in their body.
If you read Mexico, oh one, okay, you should look into that, because I saw using euro technologies, go shopping. Thick, and second thought was
nothing else interesting.
questions is, what have we done? Everybody
rushed up at once.
When I read your interviews, I did a piece in the novel about empathy, particularly your bonus was mobilization of empathy. You were trying to view it was a really interesting point about not liking empathy. Yeah. For me, it's something that can be weaponized quite easily. Those tendencies are well, you know, that's what we do be in each other's shoes. But you made a fantastic point,
if you recall it. Yeah. I
mean, we talked I mean, in virtual reality, more you hear people speak about
their work and
see VR as this empathy machine. We want to break with that sort of theory and thought, because if you're making a piece that is showing a hardship or something that a culture has had to go through one specifically, that isn't your own, who are you put yourself in a position of being empathetic for that situation
without
understanding what it's actually like to be there. So you have the headset on and you're theoretically present in that experience, because the Creator has made it so you can't really look anywhere else, because you
have a headset on. But,
you know, we like to think of it more as being mindful of the story that we're telling you had to let go of whatever preconceived notions that you may have. And just look at the story and experience it as we intend for you to experience and then come away with hopefully a new understanding and a new way to engage with
groups that you've seen in the experience.
We do have some people.
Yes, please.
Hello.
So I have a question. And I guess it's primarily for Tony, but it might be relevant to the hyphen labs as well. But since you're This is kind of associated with since you're theorizing, experience cap, experiential capitalism, I was wondering if you've thought about dreams and the ways in which dreams are kind of summon to sell products to people, I'm just like, very tuned in to how the language of dreams appears and marketing, and, you know, in in the beautiful little bits of commercial language that floats around. Because it seems like on one hand, DRI might be this space outside of capitalism. But with the computational model of the brain, there's this almost lust to map dreams and dream space and to figure out, you know, how images are stored in the brain. So does a post computational notion of the brain just totally destroy their project? And then my next question, which is kind of related, it's about the ambivalent relationship of FX theory to psychoanalysis. And I know you did a great overview of kind of debates and ethics theory and there's, you know, frequently language that you would connect with psychoanalysis use, like this idea of the unconscious or the unflawed, or something that's latent, but still drives behavior. So I'm wondering if in some ways, ethic theory is returning to some psychoanalytic ideas or if it's just completely rejecting it.
Thank you. No, I
really for veterans, so fascinating. What one thing
