P1: Viesmes 1 The artificial world acts as a space for the mind. It is a destination presented by a trick of perception. A series of images shown in quick succession can create the illusion of motion. This failure of perception has become a useful aspect of everyday life. We use this sensory failure as a success. We rapidly create visual media expanding on the form to explore representations of realities and expand fictions. The term ‘artificial’ world presupposes that there is a ‘real’ world in opposition. This term is complicated — we do not actually enter this fictional world. Rather it is an illusion of our perception and is thus still within the confines of the real world. Last night I had a dream, I was being dragged down by tiny birds. Dragged into what? I’m not sure but downwards. The birds were there, I was there, and I’m not sure if anything else was there. I focused on one bird which was pulling on my jumper sleeve, and I was terrified. I woke up, I was not terrified, and I made myself a coffee. I’m not aware of the surroundings in the dream, the number of birds or even how long I was being dragged. The artificial world I existed in must have come from an awareness of the actual, external world. It must have come from an awareness at the very least of birds, possibly an existence of my body, and a hypothetical awareness of the birds’ potential as living beings to grab me with their beaks. I have never seen birds pull a man down. I fabricated this visual element in a collaged replication of elements of the ‘real’ world while ignoring real phenomena such as physical space, gravity, momentum and the behaviour of every bird I’ve ever seen. This dream was a fiction and I felt like a victim to these fictional birds. With no knowledge of their intent, I didn’t question why this was happening or how I got there. I was somehow transported into this through some form of mental trickery we don’t quite understand. The artificial world acts as a space for the mind. P2 : Visemes 2 The screen is a beacon for some sort of desire. It may not be your desire, but it is a desire of a consumer, a creator, a culture. Whatever the beacon presents is created in a manner for the ‘real’ world. A variety of human desires can be realised through the screen. Screens can be vessels for self expression, feedback systems for communication or for developing an understanding of the ‘world’. I’m not sure when, but at one point I had the toy 20Q. It was a toy that could accurately predict what I was thinking within 20 Questions. It used a primitive machine learning network to determine that I was thinking of an octopus. More specifically, it uses a decision tree to narrow down possibilities and make educated guesses.I was completely mystified that a computer could seemingly read my mind. I tried to outsmart it, and could not understand how it knew the answer nearly every time. The premise of 20Q is to compete with a machine, to try your best to outsmart it. It is crucial to the function of the object that it has a high likelihood or at least equal chance of winning. We design things to satisfy human wants and needs, thus we are to assume that if something is designed, its existence revolves around some pursuit of a human want or need in some form. These traits may not be apparent in the thing’s completed form, although its existence is still a product of these pursuits. The pursuit of improved graphics in video games, or the creation of multiple computer languages, or the creation of neural networks represent a desire to replicate the reality in which we exist. We want to live in the artificial. We are in a pursuit of a utopia where we exist as our idealised selves in 4K. Where we communicate with computers with no need for emotional or social reciprocity. Where the artificial knows the answer to every question I have, including how that toy knew I was thinking of an octopus. P3: Visemes 3 This morning I walked into the living room and forgot why I had to. We’ve all walked through a doorway that caused us to forget. This common phenomenon was researched by Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland in 2006. Their research took place in a virtual space. The experiment sat different participants in front of a variety of screen sizes showing a simple simulation, similar to a computer game. The experiment involved participants moving objects from one table to another across two rooms in a digital environment. The objects disappeared when picked up, and so weren’t visible while in transit. Participants were asked what object they had at irregular times throughout the experiment. Walking through the doorway in the virtual environment had a significant effect on participants remembering the object. This proved the existence of this phenomenon of how entering a room can cause a temporary lapse in memory. The fact that this experiment took place in/made use of a digital environment was an afterthought, a byproduct of removing variables. The variation of screen sizes in the experiment aimed to test whether the degree of immersion affected the outcome. In Memory and Cognition, Radvansky and Copeland noted that “In general, [the greater immersion caused by a larger screen] does not play a major role” in how well the participant remembered their held object. The experiment inadvertently showed that the degree of immersion in the artificial world can be said to be consistent. The screen became a room within a room. Radvansky and Copeland’s experiment expressed the inextricable link between digital immersion and reality as we experience it. 6x9 is a virtual reality experience created by The Guardian, which places users in a simulated solitary confinement, with the intent to show the cruelty of this practice as it occurs in carceral justice systems. Interviews with victims play over the headset throughout. There is a dichotomy here relating to what we have established about the screen and what we know about solitary confinement. The screen is a fiction, a space which we can mentally ‘step into’. On the other hand, the screen is in some ways inseparable from our external, physical environment. What if we gave someone in solitary confinement and phone and a vr peripheral, to watch 6x9. Would the video's discussion of its horrors of isolation provide enough parasocial connection and stimulation to avoid the inhumane byproducts of these practices. Would walking through a virtual doorway make them forget where they were, Infinitely walking from table to table, moving objects around and trying to remember they’re holding a phone. Visemes 4 (TW: Self Harm) Being alone in a room on the internet can be considered as both a private and public act. Public, because we are being displayed and monitored, private because we are isolated. Private when watching pornography, and public on a zoom group meeting. Watching a tutorial on woodwork while drawing could feel like being in the back of a classroom, passively listening to the teacher ramble on. When we exist in digital space, our chat windows act like the experience of entering different rooms in a building. Social Behavioural Theory states that when we observe a behaviour, we remember the connections between this behaviour and its consequences, and use this to inform and determine our actions in the future. In other words, you learn social action through imitating the behaviours of others. The first time I drank coffee I decided that I had in that moment outgrown cartoons, and so I exclusively watched Two and a Half Men with my coffee for 3 weeks. Much later, when I had my first energy drink with my boys, we bought a 6 pack and chugged them in a car park until we needed to puke. The IAAP Handbook of Applied Psychology asserts that people use the physical spaces around them according to complex rules and strong preferences. These complex rules are often contradictory in relation to these public and private spaces. A teenager in the 2010’s may discover chatroulette at a sleepover, and laugh at masturbating teen boys with their peers, only to ‘publicly’ masturbate days later to teenagers laughing at him from their own chat roulette sleepovers. If we have established that the screen is both a space that we mentally exist within, and that our behaviours and future actions are predetermined by an awareness of previous experiences in social spaces, then it can be said that our behaviour in online spaces is inseparable from our awareness within the external environment, as we relate similar rules and actions to those relevant in new spaces. This is particularly useful when we think of the rise of behaviours in spaces of anonymity like trolling culture, or abusive comment threads. These simultaneously public and anonymous spaces were relatively new in the early days of Web 2, and so new forms of behaviour have developed from the possibilities presented by this ‘public anonymity’. Back when people had rooms dedicated to a computer in their house, a friend and I watched Youtube together. He realised that with an account, you could leave comments, an entirely new concept to him at the time. Talk to the producer of the video. He immediately wrote “Kill Yourself” and when I freaked out about it being linked to my account, he said “that’s what you’re supposed to do”. There was a loose mental association with the chaos attached to being a stereotypical 90’s teenager (prank calls, shoplifting) so the comment felt more like graffiti and less like actually talking to the uploader. The lack of consequences felt more like shooting at passersby in Grand Theft Auto: they provide that button. It’s what you’re supposed to do. P5 : Visemes 5 Placing content in a public forum is part and parcel with the curation of contemporary identity. Even anonymously, we are placing a self inside an observable field, placing the identity forward to an imagined observer. This could be done through both conscious and unconscious communication of values. When we place content online we are choosing to expose the personal to a public forum. Even if we have no control over how it will be processed and observed. This personal information is given with intent, and therefore we see no issue with this content. However we feel a twinge when hearing of leaked nudes, or feel discomfort knowing retail companies track our movement analytics in store. We feel exposed due to our lack of explicit consent. We’ve given information based on the terms of service but because we did not fully understand what we agreed to, we feel as if the device has taken liberties outside of our identity curation. It has gathered information about our identity which we did not consciously sculpt: recently, while using a friend's laptop I learned my friend has erectile dysfunction through the constant ads for viagra he received. In the online forum, you are encouraged to be the voyeur: looking at an influencer's photos on instagram; looking through an acquaintance’s page on Linkedin or viewing a friend’s story to peer into their day, are all easily accessible, socially acceptable and encouraged actions. The content’s availability is an expression of consent. It is ‘public’, with the same public rules which come from being outside one's house. The lack of explicit consent is why we react negatively to someone seeing our history, looking through our friends’ phone photos, or another person using our social media accounts. This digital voyeurism looks beyond the traditional limits of what is shown publicly. This discomfort in digital space subverts what usually serves ourselves as the voyeur. Seeing a version of you which doesn't fit your personal schema makes us feel as though our crafted identity is not our own, that it is something that can be manipulated without consent. An ugly photo elicits a similar response of disgust. The lines are so blurred between our identity online and our actual selves that any digital disruption can cause a cognitive dissonance. Alone, I always smile slightly while looking in the mirror . Whenever the front camera points up at my nose I look cute. If I dont have the phone in my hand for a group shot and I can’t get my face right I’m filled with terror. I feel immortal and extremely important. Instagram is a system of homogenising and monetizing the observable beauty of the world. Recently, I put up a photo of a skid mark on the road that had a flower beside it. It got 4 likes, so I took it down. A short while later, my friend Luke put up a tightly cropped photo of a car covered in snow, and I think I learned something about materiality or something good from it, either way I liked it alot and now I tightly crop my photos too. It got 52 likes. It was really beautiful and cool. The user’s observations of the world ebb and flow within a complex social understanding, through observable learned behaviour which is gathered from content creators and peers, who are often just experimenting. This encourages aesthetic appreciation to be mediated through the most normative social values. This both encourages a new appreciation for aspects of our environment while designating superior value to content which fits into the most appreciated aesthetic. It homogenises aesthetics into a hierarchy which takes your values and displays them back to you until you lose interest. The digital identity we provide to tech companies to access their affordances is itself a commodity. It can communicate its value based on the display of success. Likes, and reposts or favoriting act as a voting system. A subscription, follower, like ect. provides a tangible number to the worth of that identity. The user’s identity becomes part of a system by which self-commodification and monetisation of the personality of other users are also encouraged, through people emulating the statistically most appreciated aesthetics. The system ideologically expands, allowing itself to survive and grow. There is an assumption that any identity provided is truthful to some extent, even if the identity is ironically/falsely/inaccurately positioned. A shitpost account has become where I get the most content relating to the ongoing genocides around the world, normally shown between a video of a tiny kangaroo beside a man’s brown leather chelsea boots, and another of a hello kitty flip-phone from the early 2000’s being opened by a similarly embellished fingernail on a leopard print bedspread on the same reel. I scroll down and see an advert for viagra. No, I mean my friend does. P6 : Visemes 6 Language is used predominantly as a form of communication. The glyphs that make up written language can also be repurposed to produce something cryptic. Encryption translates text into an unreadable format. The syntax we use as a society or as individuals plays a role in influencing how we portray ourselves. The sentences: “This is how one washes their hands” “This is how we wash our hands” “This is how you wash your hands” produce the same meaning within the context of teaching people about hygiene. All speaking about the self, indirectly affecting its disposition. A society which communicates through the sentence “This is how we wash our hands” could be interpreted to imply a more communitarian understanding of the self than a “This is how you wash your hands”. Using “we” may be associated with communal ideals, but using “our” communicates a subtle difference in relation to those same ideals, shifting to imply a common goal within the sentence. Adrian Beard described this distinction in relation to the famous John F Kennedy inaugural speech “And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Rewritten by Beard in a different form, it implies completely different concepts and values. “Fellow citizens, you should not be as concerned with what America offers you, as with what you can give to America.“ The first sentence exercises a specific language, of control and power balanced with community and solidarity, the second translation loses this nuance. Within translation the intent is often to hold on to the aesthetic and semantic elements rather than simply translating the text grammatically. This is extremely difficult, balancing nuances between language barriers, cultural factors and sustaining the purity of what has been said. Early encryptions used during World War 1 used machines for keeping messages from adversaries. There was an intent to translate something which a specific group were to not be privy to. The act of encrypting this communication had a very clear opponent-versus-ally intention. The encryptions were predominantly used to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. For example, there are cases of encryptions being used to communicate within prison systems.. Just as our syntax communicates and influences our intent, as seen within JFK’s inaugural speech, our intent is communicated through its understanding by an audience. A shift in syntax could communicate something entirely different from the original meaning. Mass encryption, as we see today, communicates something about a societal shift. We are no longer just excluding oppositional governments, maintaining imbalances of power or protecting our ideas from the competition. We are excluding everyone in private communication and including everyone in public discourse. We have the ability to manage our intended audience. We are all constantly shifting between the opposition and the ally. I’m communicating through an algorithm which translates my intention into unreadable information, before sending it with the intention of decrypting it to a friend so I can communicate. In America, a teenage girlfound out she was pregnant through a Target’s consumer tracking. Her purchases had allowed an algorithm to predict she was in the second trimester of her pregnancy from her purchases of unscented lotions. The father of the teenager approached the store owner, who was unaware the teen was automatically being sent postal baby product advertisements. Upon finding out the girl was pregnant he subsequently apologised to the store owner. A person’s chatlog could be doxed by an algorithm for useful information using an incomprehensible array of predictability factors. We do not hold the key as the algorithm does. The opposition is also the ally, it takes my message and both encrypts and decrypts it before delivering to my audience. It is both the code maker and breaker. I’m messaging a friend one moment about an artisan mug I just bought at a Flea Market and unintentionally translating information about my socio-economic status, excess income and cultural capital. The resulting effect being that through a series of unobservable influential elements I now am investing in dogecoin through an online, UK-based bitcoin exchange. When we encrypt everything we send, who is the audience we are trying to keep from understanding our information? We are trying to have this ability within political oppositions, shading business dealings and activist circles to remain anonymous. The act of scrambling all of our communication reflects a paranoia we hold as a society, unintentionally belying a fear of surveillance within our communication. With the translation back from encryption to readable text, we get a syntax shift which communicates a fragility within our control of our audience, almost as if our meaning was being observed, muffled and misconstrued into something else. Portraying ourselves as communicating the exact opposite of what we want. This is how to wash your hands. Visemes 7 Games commonly use the term ‘lives’, as in the common game mechanic of ‘multiple lives’. The player is essentially given multiple tries to fulfil their task. Losing lives often gives penalties, making it harder to achieve the specific goal. This could be losing progress or rewards achieved in that playthrough. These games use terms like lives, death and ‘extra lives’–. iImplying that you can play again, that nothing is permanent. Only your positive actions are important, death is never permanent, the stakes are low. Games like checkers or cards, by contrast, still use the mechanics of winning or losing (based on the achievement of the objective) but have no engagement with death or life. The distinction being that games using an avatar more often tend to use the avatar as an extension of the self and their progress and survival is the task of the player. In cinema, for example, we are the voyeur, we are not the participant, we are not meant to be the actant. This role switches between the actors themselves. A chess piece or a playing card may symbolically represent a “queen” but the queen does not die and is instead said to be “taken” or “out of the deck” and it is almost always referred to as a piece or a card, rather than identified with the player. The player doesn’t see their objects’ 'life’ as beginning and ending with their play. It sits as a placeholder, even if the object is less abstracted than the dog or hat from Monopoly there is no sense of the individual being the object, or the object itself having a ‘life’. When Sartre discusses the paper knife in Existentialism is a Humanism he discusses the knife in relation to the concept of humanity’s relation to god the creator. We are created by god in the same way that the paper knife is manufactured by the manufacturer. Later however, Sartre states that if we are to assume god doesn’t exist, we can throw any determinism associated with our condition out the window, and are to conclude with the idea of existence preceding essence: "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards". Our identity and values are constructed as an afterthought. The production of avatars and the production of an artificial environment can be seen as an escapist retreat from the world and the actual individuals in it. Is the production of an avatar a failure to live up to Sartre’s definition of the subject? Why do we need to redefine ourselves with an alternative identity? It could be assumed that the creation of an avatar is an accentuation of the identity, a replication of this definition of the self. It could also be seen as a separate identity outside of reality, alleviating the burdens in the physical world but still maintaining one's identity, fulfilling the identity in a more suitable environment. The production of a self which does not struggle, the production of a self which has fulfilled its definition. “The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek to hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness - on the contrary he has recourse to it when there is a question of deciding secondary behaviour.” The replication of the elements of the real world are usually within the intent to immerse a player into the world more intensely. The production of an environment to ‘live’ within can be said to artificially simulate determinism in real life. A player can essentially create a predetermined life for oneself, free of the plethora of decisions and, would be acting within Sartre’s famous ‘bad faith’ model of existence. The production of an alternative self with no objectives besides the act of play trivialises things which may be fearful to us. We can position ourselves at any hierarchy, with any ability and sit outside of the difficulties of life at any point. The same engagement of play is done by children. When I was younger I used to pretend I was a superhero who had a superpower to shoot water because I would play with the hose outside my home. A live snake my sword, I fought thousands of evil people by shooting poison at them and all at once I was infinitely powerful, important and fulfilled. Now I am struggling to get a paid job, I’m struggling to satisfy myself creatively and lack the capacity I once had to pretend I’m a paper knife manufactured for a purpose

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