MEFT 3102

This is a really useful tutorial- put together by our library – to help you search for things relevant to your research online. I highly recommend it.

It will be very useful for the final research project.

This is an animated virtual actor (for most of the video)

Here is a great and short summary of some of the issues from Franciso Varela’s perspective – “Why the mind is not in the head”.

And for those interested there are some great blogs/podcasts out there on the mind, the brain, psychology and technology. I think the best podcast is Australia’s own All in the Mind. You can download it from the ABC.

Here are two interfaces you might be interested. One is somewhat literallly an inter-face … the interactive version of the Radiohead “data aesthetic” video that is discussed by Mitchell Whitelaw on his blog.The other interface involves touching plants to engage with data. This is Augmented Ecologies , A Kinesthetic User Experience.

Here’s a video of the interface in action. It uses Max/MSP (for those who are interested).

For those interested in following up the topic of the cyborg, there’s a great new issue of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences on precisely this topic, with contributions from Andy Clark, the always interesting John Protevi and Casper Bruun Jensen and many others. You can access the articles through the library site. Go to the catalogue, type in “phenomenology” and “cognitive sciences” and click the button underneath that says “journals”. The journal title will come up, and you should be able to get electronic access once you put in your student number and password.

“Transhumanism” refers to the belief that technology will help us transcend the limits of the human to become perfect (and perhaps immortal) beings. There’s an interesting series of discussions of transhumanism here, by the like of prominent thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Andrew Pickering and Don Ihde.