MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1906-1961): “All consciousness is perceptual…The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.”
Sorry that this site become an one-way philosophical conversation….but I thought this is an interesting example of phenomenological understanding…this time from Merleau-Ponty….
Source: http://www.mythosandlogos.com/MerleauPonty.html
‘Merleau-Ponty’s philsophy is much richer than I can do justice to here. But one application is to understand the psychoanalytic unconscious from a phenomenological perspective. As we’ve seen, for Merleau-Ponty, lived experience is prior to abstract reflection; it is pre-thematic. We live it, but don’t explicitly think about and calculate what we are doing. When I am most typically engaged in a task, I do not reflect on the task, and this mode of ready-to-hand engagement is the primordial, experiential ground which makes reflection possible. Whenever we reflect intellectually on experience, we have to go back to the lived world of our experience prior to that reflection. This is a way to think about the unconscious without necessarily buying into a Freudian meta-psychology. From this perspective, the unconscious can be viewed as the pre-thematic, pre-objective, lived, concrete, latent experience of our engagement with the world (with others and alongside things) prior to reflection. It is what we live out but do not speak or think. When we thematize it, bring it to reflection, we make it thematic or “conscious.” From here, we can understand repression as a lived, pre-reflective and motivated refusal to thematize or reflect on that lived experience (Sartre called this “bad faith.”).
Robert Romanyshyn gives an excellent example of this. He gives an example of a woman who is walking down the street. Whenever a man walks by her, she unreflectively pulls her coat across her breasts in order to hide her breasts. She is not reflectively aware of doing this, but at a bodily, lived level of engagement, this is an intentional, meaningful act, even if pre-reflective. Now, suppose someone notices this and calls it to her attention. She may then, perhaps even with suprise, note that she was not aware of this act. Yet if she explored this, she would likely discover that this pre-reflective act is meaningful and has a history. One can imagine that the woman sees men as sexual predators who objectify her body and are a threat. The act of covering her breasts is an act which disallows her breasts to be objectified by the gaze of those men.
If we explored further with this woman, we may find that she had been raped in the past and that the man who raped her had stared at her breasts prior to violating her. All of this history is contained in that lived, embodied, pre-reflective act of covering her breasts as she walks down the street. Merleau-Ponty would say that our history becomes “sedimented” in our bodily gestures, contained there as latent and unreflected upon even though it is meaningful and lived out in the world. To make these meanings thematic and subject to reflection is the process of, in a sense, making the “unconscious” “conscious”–or making the pre-thematic thematic. There is a kind of freedom in this: in freeing her lived, prereflective experience to the level of thematic reflection, what had previously been lived prereflectively can then be subject to a choice. The woman may choose to no longer fear men, to move beyond her aweful past, and to cease her previously latent act of covering her breasts, if she wishes to do so. This is at least one way to view a phenomenologically-oriented psychotherapy, without resorting to Freudian meta-psychology. With this phenomenological understanding of the unconscious, we can understand the unconscious as a “lateral depth.”‘
This is just the same what Doursih explains as embodied interaction or Heidegger as ‘invisible tool’!
Applying this on interactive design/art practice ???!!! psyco-art 
PROJECTS: Creative Technology and Technology Based Art
Just to awake this dead blog… see some projects what may generate some emotional response of yours 
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In the above video, the software continuously computes a Voronoi diagram colored according to pixels seen by a video camera. The tiles reshape themselves and move into place as the camera imagery changes.’ [Shiffman]
In the interactive, computer-supported installation of the Cologne artist, Vera Doerk, the viewer is confronted with his own image photographed by a camera in realtime. This image appears on a projection wall as part of a virtual three-dimensional computer model. Always the first of five projected images is being updated every fifteen minutes while the previous image moves to the end (update).
Alexitimia is also the name that Paula Gaetano, an artist from Buenos Aires, gave to her robot. It’s a big blob that feels like rubber when you touch it. But it also sweats when you caress its surface. Paula Gaetano has a background in fine art but collaborated with scientists and techno experts to develop the robot. The only sensors are for touch and the only output is water that runs from a tank hidden in the base of the work.
STILL PHENOMENOLOGY: Essential Introduction to Phenomenology
Hi interaction designers, interactive artists, interactive architects, interactive theorist……
A good overview about phenomenology can be found in the following book….
Introduction to Phenomenology
By Dermot Moran, Published 2000 Rouledge
Introduction to Phenomenologyis an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology’s nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology’s most famous thinkers, and introduces and assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon,Introduction to Phenomenologyis an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vitalcurrent in intellectual thought.
Observations: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ~ Don Norman
Recipe of academic fame: look like a Santa Claus and repeat endlessly the importance of cognitive involvement of human action…
Csikszentmihalyi’s FLOW ~ Don Norman’s User-centered Design (UCD)
Don Norman’s NEW lecture : The Design of Future Things 2007
CS 547 | Human-Computer Interaction Seminar:
http://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/
Stanford HCI Group:
http://hci.stanford.edu/
Stanford Center for Professional Development:
http://scpd.stanford.edu/
Big Names of Phenomenology
If anyone still interested to look into Phenomenology, here are some big names of classical phenomenology. Worth to explore something new as well:
- Edmund Husserl
- Simone de Beauvoir (gf of Sartre)
- Martin Heidegger
- E. D. Hirsch Jr.
- Wolfgang Iser
- Hans Robert Jauss
- Georges Poulet
- Jean-Poul Sartre
Would be nice to see some interaction here….
Today’s meeting and what/when for next time.
For those unable to be in the office today, we spent most of the session just discussing some of the administatory aspects of bringing this blogsite and the seminar/meetings cohesively together and getting some form of informal system in place that allows for everyone to post interesting and relevant ‘stuff’ that can both be discussed on the blog and in the organised sessions.
Gianni has played with the template to allow it to be more functional, displaying the tags and categories and more on the right hand side. It was suggested today that for the time being the blog should be used as somewhere to post items that we find useful for our PhDs, with an eye for sharing influential references, resources, techniques, work etc for the others in the group. This will – hopefully – generate some discussion on the blog that can thus be taken forward in the Dilettante research sessions. Some basic categories have been set up as well – Theory, Practice, Methodology, Issues and Seminars – which if stuck to for the time being will keep it simple. All this can be altered of course, so any feedback or thoughts, especially those unable to attend today, is appreciated.
After all this discussion there was no time to talk about actual PhD matters, so it was supposed that we carry forward what Hannah proposed last time for the next meeting. If anybody has any more thoughts, or wants to post something to generate discussion before the meeting, then please do! Also, we need to decide when will be a good time for the next Dilettante session… next Weds there is a PhD pre-viva presentation, so not suitable.
Sorry if I have forgotten anything from today guys – I’m sure I have – so edit/add anything that should be here.
Conscious Entities
http://www.consciousentities.com/
This site may be useful to those who are trying to meander through the unenviable task of understanding certain aspects of consciousness and the minefield of theorists that are out there. Although one person’s view at the end of the day, the articles are written in a curious manner and attempts to explain two-sides (or more) of the mind/body/world problem. The site is also regularly updated, which is a bonus.
Phenomenology : An Overview and Application (embodied interaction)
Please see the web site below it provides an general (basic) overview of phenomenological understanding and some interesting applications of embodied interaction:
Alan Kay:Doing with Images Makes Symbols (The History of Graphical Interface)
I found this video very useful, especially the part about learning (tennis playing) …. It is something what Heidegger (hammer), Ihde (chalk), Merleau-Ponty (gun) and many others argued for…. [Kay, tennis racket]
Alan Kay is the guy who claimed to be the first developer of a graphical interface (GUI)…. (http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Kay.html)
More about Alan Kay: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
