“Consider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion - ”
TRAUMA MACHINES
Chair of Univ. Prof. Kathrin Aste ./studio 3 - Institute for experimental architecture Faculty of Architecture, University of Innsbruck
A Neurophenomenological Approach to Cognitive Architecture
The material brain mediates everything that we feel, sense, think, create, and do. The world perceived, reality, is a construction of billions of neural networks operated within the material brain. However, a traumatic event disrupts the bodily experience and the perception of reality. The neural connectivity of the plastic brain changes after any traumatic event; therefore, it may affect how the plastic brain operates, which may cause post-traumatic stress disorder, known as PTSD. Malabou argues that whilst plasticity describes the giving and receiving of form, plasticity also brings with it the capacity to explode or annihilate form. This “destructive plasticity”, as she calls it, retains a creative potentiality, darkly sculpting new forms out of the annihilation of old ones. [1] A person suffering from a brain injury can find themselves suddenly transformed into a completely different person, unrecognizable to their family or friends, with different personalities, different emotions – sometimes without emotions – different memories, disasocciated, disembodied. These transformations, for Malabou, show how the plastic brain is capable not just of only linear, developmental change and adaptation, but also darker, more radical transformations by which someone becomes entirely other through a trauma.[2]. The thesis studies the plasticity of the intelligent machines, questions the cognitive capacities of virtual spaces through the perspective of ‘operational images’, a term coined by Harun Farocki. in his Installation, Serious Games, Immersion, shows the importance of gaming technologies that have been used in training soldiers in the U.S military. The 3D reconstruction of the warzone landscape is being used as a training simulation to develop strategies inside the war terrain. Ironically, the same simulation was used by the traumatized soldiers after the war as a therapeutic virtual environment to deal with their stressing memories. Harun Farocki was the first to notice that image-making machines and algorithms were poised to inaugurate a new visual regime. Instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images started to “do” things in the world. Here, vision becomes an activity beyond and outside of the human subject, and it is a product emerging from the realm of machines and apparatuses of capture, one that retroactively conditions & manufactures human vision.[3] As Luciana Parisi argues, this type of algorithmic architecture of the thought exists outside of the cognitive architecture of the brain, sustained by a neurosynaptic system of connection. For her, cognition is not any longer reduced to biophysical bodybrain, but it involves the algorithmic mass computation, objects of incomputable algorithms that produce their own actual mode of thinking which can not be reproduced or instantiated by the mind’s neurophenomenology. Following the extended mind thesis of Andy Clarke & David Chalmers arguing that the human mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the digital and physical worlds. The Material Engagement Theory proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and, in that way, function as extensions of the mind itself.[4]
The ongoing thesis seeks new communication strategies and spatiotemporal space-making to provide new empathic relations between human and non-human, humans, and their environment both in the physical and virtual sense. Through a series of studies, the thesis explores how time based media & XR technologies can extend the capacities of human cognition so that they function as the extensions of the human body and have a material impact on brain plasticity, specifically in the context of Traumas and Post-Traumas. Therefore, methodologically the notion of cognition is considered not only as a bioartefact shaped by the environment (possibly with the interactive virtual environments) but also as a digital embodied entity that is not reduced to the biophysical brain-body, in forms of digital spatiotemporal virtual experiences. The Trauma Machine explores the materiality of the interactive virtual environments and the communication with artificially intelligent virtual humans to help people dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so-called PTSD, and offering embodied interfaces such as Motion Tracking Suits, EEG devices, and Head-mounted Displays, and Artificial Intelligence Models, such as, IBM Watson Cognitive Cloud Computing to transfer experience from proprioceptive virtual bodies to the biological bodies The Trauma Machine is an interactive Extended Reality installation designed to help people dealing with PTSD. It specifically looks at derealization & depersonalization disorder and reanimates the symptoms inside the 3D virtual environment interactive by the use of Kinect motion capture cameras. The Trauma Machine offers an embodiment of virtual humans inside interactive therapeutic virtual environments. The so-called Avatar Therapies allow people who are dealing with PTSD to inhabit their 3D scanned virtual avatars and to negotiate the symptoms of PTSD inside enactive/interactive virtual environments. The project, therefore, situates itself, in the field of neurocognitive architecture. It acts as a mediator between computation/thought and considers meta-modeling method to explore new digital spatiotemporal experiences for brain plasticity.