Tuesday, 24 November 2009


Lily Cole by Gillian Wearing (2008)

A model formed by the environment - a puppet.

A puppet with emotions, sensation, mind, human structure etc. hidden behind a beautiful surface.

A living marionette controlled by the environment?

What we see is the surface, a mask fashioned by the environment.

The body and mind in conflict with the environment? The surface not allowed to act like a real adaptive interface would do? Are the environmental forces acting on the interface dominating where as the personal forces are restrained?


Allows the artificial mask Lili to use her face as real interface behind the mask?


Lily has two faces - two interfaces:

The real face - the surface of mind and body, treated by the mind and body on the one side and by the environment on the other side.

The mask face, a reproduction of the shape formed by the environment.


What happens between the two interfaces?

Wednesday, 18 November 2009


A chain of relationships released by the happening of one event - a sweeper attracted by a with flour filled crisp bag on his way...


A Walkers bag on the pavement immediate interacts with the users passing by. They either ignore it or respond to it with a change of their behaviour. With a human being or any living organism the result is generally unpredictable as it follows a nonlinear pattern of organization.


Living systems respond autonomously to disturbances from the environment with structural changes, i.e. by rearranging their pattern of connectivity. A living organism records previous structural changes, and each structural change influences the organisms future behaviour. A living system can never be directed only disturbed, but will maintain the freedom to decide what to notice and what will disturb it. (Maturana / Varela - The Santiago Theory of Cognition)


Wednesday, 11 November 2009

One of the results of routine live is that our brain optimizes recurring activities by filtering redundant, secondary information out in order to focus onto general trained operations. During this simplification of our perception lots of information is being lost and cannot be used for further development.


Freuds Censorship:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Instinct_and_the_Unconscious/Freud's_conception_of_the_Censorship


How can the routine be broken up and the hidden information become visible again?


In “Understanding the Media” Marshall McLuhan is dividing between hot and cold media. "A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition”.... High definition is the state of being well filled with data.... Hot media are, therefore, low in participation or completion by the audience." A cold medium instead keeps lots of information secret and inspires the observer to compose and accomplish their individual image driven by personal experiences.


To stimulate the personal perception methods like disturbance, codification and the unusual association with a situation could be used to make the unseen, unpredictable visible. So the observer / participant could become a part of an input-output-system where he is forced to question his perception and behavior within the routine live by simultaneously providing, feeding the system with his own experience.



A Walkers crisp bag being catapulted by the wind caused by a passing bus is reacting like a nonliving system to a linear chain of cause and effect.

Walkers on the street_cutout
















Spacial camera: While the loose hanging camera was forced to swing by the wind of the passing vehicles it created a dynamic space around itself.