[-empyre-] Tamiko Thiel on cyber-animism

[Mathias Fuchs]

Hi Tamiko,

you stretch the notion of augmented reality quite wide, when you include 
cave-paintings and animist folk-practices.
Wouldn't one have to introduce some aspect of conscious understanding of 
the nature of the augmented when speaking about augmented reality. In 
other words: if I consider something like a mountain ghost or a river 
goddess as real and make a cave painting of it, then this painting is 
part of my reality, it is not augmented reality.
The problem is this: If we consider any non-physical or even invisible 
artefact as augmenting our reality, then reality shrinks down to the 
merely physical or merely visible.

The buffalo of a cave-painting is real for the painter of the buffalo, 
and even the power of the buffalo and the spirit of the buffalo-god is 
real for the painter. Those features do not differ from magnetism or 
rainbows or other real phenomena.

I would suggest to call something an augmentation of reality only if it 
is a consciously introduced element of our environment that we believe 
to be unreal. Such is a display element in the viewfinder of a camera, a 
hologram on a bill etc. - not the feather of a bird that we believe to 
be part of a bird goddess.

Do you see what I intend to achieve? I want to keep a difference in 
between "real" and "physical". This is also of relevance in the light of 
what the Germans call "Positivismusstreit". The side I am on tries to 
ake a point that phenomena like Freud's "es" or "ich" are real because 
we believe they exist. We would not want to classify them as augmented 
aspects of reality and as unreal. My question is therefore:

I wonder whether it makes sense to distinguish between conscious 
non-belief or half-belief (Pfaller) extensions of our physical 
environment (virtual or augmented reality) and the animistic or 
religious  full-belief forms. The latter would have to be called real.

Best
Mathias


On 20/04/2011 04:00, empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote:
> The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the
> first forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult
> artifacts.

-- 
Dr. Mathias Fuchs
   European Masters in Ludic Interfaces
   http://ludicinterfaces.com
   Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games
   Salford University, School of Art&  Design, Manchester M3 6EQ
   http://creativegames.org.uk/
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