the timboucher experience

Continuing on the line of conjecture related to sensory substitution. The article on how simple, scientifically, it is to induce the sensation that you’re perceiving your own body from outsid yourself uses the following image:

Summarizing what they seem to be saying, you have a harness rigged up to yourself and to a mannequin so that you’re perceiving when you look down at your “self” the actual body of the mannequin which has cameras and other input devices mounted where it’s figurative head is. Similar to the ganzfeld effect, I imagine, they are saying that’s basically all it takes: is creating just enough of the illusion of it happening that your brain then goes the extra mile, takes the “leap of faith”, and completes the perception more seamlessly than maybe any technology could. Okay, that’s me interpolating and extrapolating a little bit, but I think it’s basically how it works.

They were even saying that if you come at the mannequin body with a knife like to cut it that the perceiving center physically attached to a human body elsewhere in timespace will react with anxiety, like it’s own person is in danger. The somatic identification is that strong.

Maybe I’ve just been thinking about the Mercer Box of Philip K. Dick a lot, but the imagery involved of somebody stabbing this mannequin which becomes sort of like a universal “everyman” type identifier, well it just reminds me of the Stations of the Cross in Catholicism, which you’re supposed to sort of follow around inside the space of a church and ritually reenact the Passion of the Christ, as it were. One part of which involves him getting stabbed in the ribs by Roman soldiers.

Funny how things change.

• Mirror Neurons
• Operating Systems As Opera: Theatrical Production Within Mediated Sensory Experience
• All Things Are Broadcasting Stations, Living Internet OS
• Body Language Mirroring
• Aristotle on Nature