Body Mind Change
When the David Cronenberg exhibit was presented at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, there was a secondary exhibit taking place upstairs. This exhibit, known as Body Mind Change, was an attempt at creating an alternate reality wherein individuals can take part in an experiment in making their lives better through the installment of a pod (essentially a real world “adaptation” of eXistenZ). The exhibit was predictably cheesy, if only due to the overacting that took place at the exhibit. However, the process of “creating” your pod, which took place online away from human hands, followed a more Cronenbergian process, through a mixture of subconscious humanity and machine-like processing. Realizing that the human touch took away from the experience, which would require a two-sided artifice to take place between me and another individual, who would probably feel quite silly themselves, I decided to have my pod mailed to me. It arrived recently. It is a cheap piece of plastic, which arrived in a biohazard bag, but it still retains some interest through its usage of a specialized hashtag, #podlovesme. Rather than having to engage in a shared psychosis with another individual, risking a folie a deux of sorts, each individual can, in a seemingly tongue-in-cheek sort of way, use the advantages of a machine to feed into the psychosis of others in a variety of elaborate ways, whether through very minor tweets about how much pod has improved one’s life (with a tee-hee of sorts) to doctored images of “implanted” pods to perhaps make other viewers wonder if their questions of authenticity are misplaced. As many have learned in the age of the internet, and some here have learned it quite recently, machines can make people believe some quite unlikely things.
oh, I missed that part – bring your pod in for show and tell! :-) I’ve been reading Turkle this week (Alone Together)and her chapter on the elderly relating to robots fits right in with your post.