augmented illusions

Last night, of course, I had to walk around the apartment, using my magic wand cellphone to scout the space. I have a substantial shrine in the Tibetan style, two rows of water bowls, lots of bric à brac. Months ago I had a very strange, first, experience of how -if I clicked towards them - I would get a visual image of lamp posts in my mind by sound. Correction: not by the sound itself, but by how I processed its bounce, apparently. Now the sensation was even stronger, because the image’s sweep-sound tracks shapes and shades of colour, so the experience is much more direct. At the sound coming from my cellphone, immediately, a visual sensation of three water bowls welled up inside me. I stepped back a bit. Four water bowls and behind that a shape I decided must be the Samantabhadra statue. I reached out my hand: there it was. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of joy and newly found power combined that swept over me. I’ve been thinking on and off, at M.’s prompting, about a Media in Transition proposal I’m formulating. Space and time, or rather: “visual-spatial” and “auditory-sequential”. In the visual-spatial there is power, control. In the auditory-sequential, there is subversion. I had to think about how in the early months of the war against Afghanistan, much technology was employed to establish Bin Laden’s location. The reasoning was that eventually a cellphone signal would betray him. He, however, made use of couriers on foot to relay messages over long distances. Next week, we will kick off a substantial conceptual project by gathering people around the fire to talk about it. Our hope is that by telling the project’s story to each other, we will build up a communal history of it, a shared repository of stories through time. Much in project management is about power and control over planning, a spatial representation of time. Yet in ceremonies, there is no project plan, yet the ceremony unfolds because everyone shares its story. So perhaps this is what we are doing: build a project like a ceremony, so that it will unfold itself.

I wrote about Peter Meijer’s The vOICe yesterday, and last night, between waking and sleeping it occurred to me that I would be able to use my cellphone as a viewfinder, or a scope. I can try to explain how vOICe (”Oh, I See!) works, but Meijer’s explanation is much better:

The vOICe vision technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live camera views through sophisticated image-to-sound renderings. In theory this use of digital senses could lead to synthetic vision with truly visual sensations (”qualia”) through crossmodal sensory integration, by exploiting the existing multisensory processing and neural plasticity of the human brain through training and education. The vOICe implements a form of sensory substitution where the goal is to bind visual input to visual qualia with a minimum of training time and effort, and improve quality of life (QoL) for blind users. The vOICe also acts as a research vehicle for the cognitive sciences to learn more about the dynamics of large-scale adaptive processes, including attention and expectation guided bottom-up and top-down learning processes, and involving cross-modal neuromodulation in the human brain. Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes can be evoked in most sighted people.

The site offers a cellphone application for download that works on many Nokia phones: point here with your phone’s browser to install over the air. Continue Reading »

Sometimes I’m on skype with a friend, and - because the sound quality is pretty good - I can hear the most fantastic birdsong in the background. Formerly, I relied on written communication more: it was almost always easier to reach me by email than by phone. Now, I’ve started using my voice more, so, it’s skype more than anything. As the audio is very clear, many background noises at the other end of the line are audible. I love that. I love the proximity of voice, and the existence of a context, a background to the mental landscape making itself heard. It’s an added bonus to a conversation that I didn’t previously consider. J. asked me, the other day: “Are your other senses sharper? Do you hear more?” I’m sure it often seems that way, like a while back, when I was inside Latei and could guesstimate A’s arrival by taxi when I made out a Mercedes’ diesel against the background noise. Continue Reading »

It took a while for me to register it, but finally it sank in: Big Brother 9, currently on Channel 4, has a blind housemate, Michael. It appears that Michael is a DJ with radio show Blindsighted, so apart from personal motives, there’s something political at stake here too. His profile carries many comments on his personal habits (deemed disgusting) and his shouting in the diary room. Plus, of course, the usual drivel about how he “plays the disability card” and how this is not to turn into an advantage. To me, the hard thing about being on BB would be the house, which is chaotic, with many people in the same room, much social interaction in groups and a fairly chaotic lay out. It seems (I’ve been looking at the catch up clips) that no one has taken the trouble to familiarize him with the house. People leave things on the floor, something about which Michael complains. So, he’s more helpless than he could or should be. Mario, fellow housemate and Sylvester Stallone look-alike, sort of preys on this, by “helping” Michael, i.e., treating him like an idiot. It’s interesting: not only the “outside” reactions to Michael, as displayed in the comments, but also the fact that inside the house, Michael himself can’t seem to take the matter in hand, although he’s a bit of a moaner which doesn’t get him any sympathy.

The other day I was in a conversation about how the language I use for “perception” seems to be changing. I hadn’t noticed it myself but apparently it was very noticeable. It’s true, I’ve been noticing changes, but I wasn’t sure if what I was registering would really constitute “a change”. I must say, I do “play by ear” more, as M. would call it, but I had no idea that such a perceptual shift would have such far reaching consequences. As I found myself telling yesterday: it’s not as if I “see” things in my mind’s eye, but there is a richness to the perception that is not visual, yet it is very much present. I guess that this might be the indication that I am building up a new world from my perception, where the old reality was one of sight. It’s interesting too, because I used to be of the opinion, that the fact that buddhism speaks so much about “view” is caused by the “solidity of seeing”: Continue Reading »

Today we walked from Sneek to IJlst. It’s the old footpath from Sneek to IJlst that cuts through the fields and follows the medieval coast of the Middle Sea. The weather was good for sailing: sunny, with a force 5 wind. I’ve often sailed the stretch from IJlst to Sneek, coming from Langweer; I think everyone who goes to Friesland for the sailing must have done the same thing at one time or another. Together with D. I walked past Tinga, into the green space of the pastures. It is the landscape that speaks the most eloquently to me. I did a lot of sailing here and still know to which villages the church towers belong. As we made our way along the old coast, the thought hit me that this time last year, I was just starting to notice something odd with my sight. Objects and people appeared and reappeared as if by magic if I moved my head a little from side to side. Continue Reading »