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Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine – #Ljudmila #digitaldish

These are my notes from the talk by Nedine Kachornnamsong – Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine.

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Copenhagen Airport project, In Place-Spective, 2005-2006

  • Airports are transitional spaces without special meaning to people – it’s a non-place. So how can we construct a place inside an airport?
  • So what’s a sense of place? It’s hard to share and compare your sense of place with each other. Architectural approach might not be the best way to do it.
  • Sense of place doesn’t have to be attached to a physical space. It’s more of a virtual construct based on social interaction.
  • The problem: you don’t want to socialize, because you’re in the transit; your’ve very vulnerable and you care only about your travels.

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Posters inside washrooms, that you can use to share things with each other. The posters were placed inside toilet doors.

  • The Ghost in the machine is used to criticize the idea of dualism by Descartes. Dualism – the body is just a vehicle of the mind. By having a belief that body is a slave the mind, it’s the same as saying that we’re just a ghost in the machine.
  • It’s about how you define the humanity – separation of human and being, human vs. animal. Animals are locked into instincts while humans are of free will.
  • Animal is the machine, while human is the ghost in the machine; meaning that we’re ghost of the animal.

The Living Machine

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Haraway Reader. 1985. Ed. Haraway, Donna. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7-45.

This new machine becomes a problem because it comes very close to the concept of humanity. So we need to redefine what it means to be a human.

Yes/No/Maybe

Pyshical event that takes elements from the online dating site:

  • Anonymity
  • Degree of interest
  • Object of desire (something that you can interact with)

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Look for it in near future in Ljubljana.