alleshannes.

For a healthy relationship, you should leave a short notice for your friends at least once in a while. But — huh — somtimes, days are really packed and you tend to forget things like that anyway…

Why not let your digital companion take on some routine care taking? Computers are well versed with keep alive customs:

The “keep-alive” keyword [...] allows the sender to indicate its desire for a persistent connection.

Here is how it works:

With the socially aware address book (from my Master’s Thesis) it will know who your friends are–and you will be able to describe your social aspirations, too. You then only need to define where you store interesting images or your latest writings or what you’re currently occupied with and the system will start sending off short notices every now and then.
If your friend happens to implement the same digital assistant (second line in the picture), your digital sidekicks might end up in a circle of automatic messages and reponses, chatting along on their own. Bypassing your human existence altoghther…
But your assistant can also propose some more personal messages that require your contribution (as depicted in the last line).

After all, some digital support is better than neglecting your remote friends too much, isn’t it?
(discussion declared open…)

When talking about virtual and real worlds it soon gets difficult to determine what we consider as virtual and real. Our thoughts and imaginations are not technically enhanced or otherwise mysterious but they are not part of the actual, material world, either. They do shape our perspective and our plans and actions.

Public Buildings are solid environments but their particular determination, they way we perceive the building and select a proper behavior is not built-in but a system of signs and codes that we read permanently.
With the means of Semiotic Analysis I investigated on the relation between (real) buildings and our interpretation, that means our (virtual) reconstruction. The results are presented by an interactive documentation that reflects the subjective process of decoding (unfortunately, texts in German only). It is the fruit of the Master Class in Design Theory, led by Prof. Dr. Rainer Funke.

As a first example, I examined the Berlin Central Railway Station as a hub of public transport on the one side and I discovered an interference with the mixed-in shopping mall concept on the other one. Having travelling in mind initially, a passenger has to cross the shopping sector. This changes the context for his decoding of sign systems, so he misses the guides to the trains easily.

flash, 3.4 MB

For the second example, I was wondering which signs and features render a church into a somewhat mystic room with a very special atmosphere. Although one could still call it a house by its primary features it makes people whisper and feel different. Featured buildings include St. Hedwig, St. Paulus, Sophienkirche, and Maria Saal (Kaernten, A)
flash, 4.6 mb

Everyone uses Google (or search engines in general) to find something from the past: What are the soccer results from last week end, who wrote an article about surveillance, where is that “critical update” for my webbrowser? Google finds out the questions and needs of a lot of people (e.g. 50% of all US-search) and with a little extrapolation one could say: of the world. The (monthly) statistics on the psyche of the world can be inspected at the Google Zeitgeist.
The future is nothing random but created by ourselves everyday through actions that are driven exactly by these questions and needs that condense at the search interface of Google. Wouldn’t Google be able to predict the things to come?

While this is one of the stunning (at least to me) results of the Google and Borges class at Humboldt University, I developed a game concept that takes one step back and leaves prophecy to the players. …

For getting a grip on my master thesis I made up a collection of fields of interest. There are a couple of buzz-words that I want to unfold in order to make them fructous for further investigations. This is one of the first steps and I hope to be able to add some details soon.

simulation/virtual
simulation depends and constructs reality (WoWarcraft, Second Life)
machines simulate an interface in order to get usable for humans

thoughts and theses?
opposite (according to Baudrillard): Illusion

is simulation linked to virtuality?
is operationalization the basis for simulation?

authenticity
unique, personal experience <> reproductive society, sampling

what role plays the “I” and how do we define it? >emotions

truth
democracy (many) <> experts (peers)
poetry and truth (>Goethe)

emotion
human control system, adding salience(”weight”) to information
subconscious

Links to authenticity and maybe truth?

games
a way to liberty/freedom (>Schiller)?
some things can not be described directly but rather circumscribed
storytelling, truth in poetry

immersion
which truth(s) might be created, available or perceived by being immersed into some medium, computer games in particular?

emergence
can truth come from (super)complex systems? What do emergent structures show?
are evolutionary systems useful?

massive systems can no longer be calculated but must be estimated statistically and are often simulated in advance > simulation

Immersion (lat.: imergere = to dip): feeled presence in another world

A “world” might be defined by

• a set of objects and individuals
• an inhabitable environment
• its complete understandability (for external spectators)
• space of possibilities (to take action etc)

building blocks of immersion

• being caught (backgrounds from cognitive science)
• a computergame defines the setting and the “destiny of the voyage”
• by interacting we accept the (game)rules

There is no effort necessary, only conscious analysis is capable of distinguishing between real and virtual. Familiar images and hardware that is intuitively operable help to stay “inside the world”.

Finding ourselves in a state of “amphibic” awareness, we flicker between sensing reality (keyboard, environment) and the game world.

“Possible Worlds” is a term established by Analytical Philosophy (David Lewis): We define our world as a part of the real, absolute world by our perspective. Our view and the real world are linked indexically.
Immersion/Imagination shifts the center of our (real-world) perspective into a fictional world (recentering). The new world is constituted by its rules only which cannot be questioned in consequence.

This is very briefly the content of a presentation I gave (long version in German follows) while I was attending a class at FU Berlin, Seminar for Film Studies on Computergames and Media Theory hosted by Judith Keilbach. It is based on the text

Marie-Laure RYAN, Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore/London 2004: Johns Hopkins University Press
…

I’m very happy that I managed to get into the Masters Program for Interface Design at FH Potsdam. This proposal and a little presentation did it for me!
Now the real work starts as I want to re-work my proposal and re-think my ideas. I’m very curious about the results…

Here you can find the first outlining of my work (german only, unfortunately)

real? why our world has to be virtual if it wants to be authentic pdf, 32 kb