Virtual Reality: Our Digital Escape RESPONSE

[alopes98]

NOTES:

- "REALITY IS MERELY AN ILLUSION, ALBEIT A VERY PERSISTENT ONE" Albert Einstein
- More and more involved with technology as time goes on
Ex: Phones, computers, overall digital experiences
- Creating an environment indistinguishable in the world
- Virtual reality goes back far to the 1950s, as we may think it is a new concept; EXPERIENCE THEATRE
- Created one of a kind camera; 1957 (Sensorama) which is a reality simulator with 3D visuals, seat vibrations, simulating wind to imitate reality; kind of like a real theatre but with real life experiences
- What is VR? > Portal into any world we can model and create to explore by humans; becoming apart of a world we make and put ourselves in situations we would not necessarily be in on a day by day basis
- Oculus, Vive, etc. headsets that help you experience an immersive idea in another experience (for ex: going to space) (Human Biology)
- EYES: seeing the world in different ways
- Can be used for serious procedures such as seeking medical attention without killing someone or potentially inflicting on someones life indefinitely; mental health, anxiety, etc
- PRESENCE

PHRASES:
- "Your brain is good at telling what is real and what is not which is a necessity; without this VR is useless" IMERSION
- "Haptic Technology; its a layer on top of having VR headsets; its a technology that helps you feel things in a simulation"
- "Although the human brain is smart, its easy to trick. Rubber Hand Illusion is a great example. Using both hands, real and fake, a simulation is used to adapt the brain and sense of sight.This conversion makes you believe what is NOT real"
- "Dreams are different; in your dreams you can fly and play any instrument you want and your brain makes you believe its real. Dreaming makes humans incredible making realistic stories from our memory. Dreams are limitless and assuming to advance VR, realities can become better and more enjoyable than the real world"
- "Digitizing humanity to design electrodes to read neurons and send and create signals; you would have a form of mind control. You could fly or do whatever you want"
- "Morton Heilig (1950) was a cinematographer who developed VR using EXPERIENCE THEATRE"
- "People realized what was possible and realized this was just the beginning"
- "Think of VR as a portal into any world that we can create; a simulated reality"
- "Any idea, location, reality can be created and fully immersed into"
- "The reason why we can perceive depth so well is because of our eyes which we all see in different ways".

[alopes98]

- DON SCHON: "The Reflective Practitioner"
- Reflective Practice is the practice by which professionals become aware of their implicit knowledge base and learn from their experience. It is to reflect on the behavior as it happens.
- "In practice of various kind, what form does reflection in action take? What are the differences? and what features of the process are similar?"
- "What sets the limits of out ability to reflect-in-action? How do individuals and institutional constraints interact with one another? And in what directions should we look to increase the scope and depths of reflection-in-action."
- "Schön, through his proposal of the reflective-practice concept, opposed design as rational problem solving defended by Simon in his Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969/1996). To Shön design is not problem solving activity in the sense that Problem solving is generally considered as handling problems as “given,” whereas the process of “problem setting” is neglected."

[alopes98]

- Become/Becoming (DELEUZE): The process of Becoming is not one of limitation or analogy, it s generative of a new way of being that is a function of influences rather than resmeblances.

[alopes98]

Assemblage Theory: Deluge's theory of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.

Manuel DeLanda: New York-based cross-disciplinary theorist and artist; applies assemblage theory to fields such as linguistics, economics, or sociology as well as to science and mathematics.

Mapping the Future of Countries:
- Connected spaces and unconnected spaces
- 90% of the population that won't leave the place in which they were born
- Fundamental problem: basic political geography; how do we distribute ourselves; border conflict
- How do people, money, religious interact to change the map of the world
- 1945: 100 countries; world war ll > Europe was devastated but held large parts of the world
- 40's,50's,60's- New countries were born
- 1990: Creation of new states in Eastern Europe and stands in Central Asia
- Today we have sovereign states: does someones gain have to be someones lost?
- Russia is still the largest and China is the most populous; Most of Russia is concentrated in Western providences close to Europe; Russia will decline about 120 M people
- Today donors spend billions of dollars on commuter rail roads and infrastructure
- The lesson from Curtis Dunn is that independence alone without infrastructure is futile
- Arctic seabed: who will win Canada, Russia or the US> It's actually Greenland and Denmark is going to get smaller
- Geopolitics is unsentimental; we will always search for Equilibrium
- We fear civil wars and death tolls; how do we change borders?

How Megacities are Changing the Map of the World:
- Reimagine how life is on earth
- the skeleton is the transportation system of roads and railways
- What about international borders? we have less than 500,000 kilometers of borders; lets build a better map of the world by overcoming ancient mythology
- Geography is destiny but it is a fatalistic adage telling us that landlocked countries are condemned to be poor and that vast distances are insurmountable.
- India populations will exceed those of China
- Most of Egypt 80m people are expanding
- Lagos; Africa's largest city will expand towards the Ivory Coast
- By 2030 we will have as many as 50 of mega city cultures

[alopes98]

"Reassembling the Social" (Bruno Latour): Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon.

[alopes98]

Brenda Laurel: As one of the earliest female game designers, Laurel became active in writing on the topic of developing videogames for girls. She posited that while the early videogame industry focused almost exclusively upon developing products aimed at young men, girls were not inherently disinterested in the medium. Rather, girls were simply interested in different kinds of gaming experiences. Her research suggested that young women tended to prefer experiences based around complex social interaction, verbal skills, and transmedia.

Gary Wolf: Gary Wolf is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he writes regularly about the culture of science and technology (as well as many other topics). He is also the co-founder, with Wired colleague Kevin Kelly, of The Quantified Self, a blog about "selfknowledge through numbers."

[alopes98]

Luce Irigaray: A phenomenological approach to this question offers some help, notably through Heidegger's analyses of "Dasein", "being-in-the-world" and "being with'. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, it remains almost impossible to identify an other outside of our own world. "Otherness" is subjected to the same values by which we are ourselves defined and thus we remain in "sameness'. In this age of multiculturalism and in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of our values and Heidegger's deconstruction of our interpretation of truth, Irigaray questions the validity of the "sameness" that sits at the root of Western culture.

[alopes98]

1) Direct, Surprised, Pressure, Tense, Vulnerable, Stern, Timid
2) I picture a place in the middle of nowhere. Scattered houses, mainly land with trees and ankle high grass. The atmosphere is very direct and interpersonal. You know of everyone but you only associate yourself with the ones you love the most. The whether is very cold. This cold is rather unique. Not only can you see your breathe outside but since the village has dull personality, you feel it more. The scene takes place in a captains headquarters. The atmosphere there is very stern. As the captain is speaking he is evoking fear into the second party. As the conversation goes on, the fear is being projected more into the atmosphere but the second party is trying to hold his composure. He succeeds and is dismissed and as he leaves, the feeling of tension slowly decreases.
3) As I watched this part of the movie, I pictured being in a professors office. Since the space is so personal, you are able to openly tell the personality in which you are dealing with. I start to feel more pressure as the professor does not know me so merely as a girl who sits in the front row of his/her class. What does he think of me? What are his presumptions? Am I giving off a sense of fear? Sit up straight, you want to look more professional. Im telling the truth but does he think I'm lying? What should I say? As these words race through my mind, I hope nothing but the meeting to end in that instant. As I am finally dismissed, the tension in the room is more at ease.

[alopes98]

Peter Senge: Learning Organization - the learning organization. Peter Senge’s vision of a learning organization as a group of people who are continually enhancing their capabilities to create what they want to create has been deeply influential. We discuss the five disciplines he sees as central to learning organizations and some issues and questions concerning the theory and practice of learning organization

Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat - The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional[2] but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog".[3] The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.[Note 2] This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity

[alopes98]

Hardt and Negri - Multitude: Multitude describes an internally heterogeneous social subject that is capable of political action. The term has been used since the 1990s to refer to the new conditions and strategies of political organizing and political action, particularly those involved in the global justice movements.