The Mind Behind the Pages
The psychology of individuals in the modern world is affected greatly by the inextricable presence of the Internet in their lives. At the same time, a serious and fascinating question rises: What or who is there behind the pages? Is a new, individual consciousness, the consciousness of the Web itself, emerging and evolving?
In two widely-known psychological tests—the Rorschach test and word association—subjects' perceptions of and reactions to some given information are recorded and then analyzed via a psychological interpretation. The most important point is that both of these tests and the analyses are based on a person’s first reaction to some feeds of information, not his or her response after thinking. In the Rorschach test, the feed is some set of inkblot-like images; in word association it is words.
Both of the tests show the brain’s crucial function: the search engine, where we can notice the Web has seemingly the same or similar mechanism as a human mind does. Almost any mainstream website has its own embedded search engine, that always responds directly to what you feed to it. And the search results, no matter if they are articles, news, images or videos, are all based on the relevance to the feed.
And these two well-established psychological tests, once only applied to test humans, are now applied in this piece to test the Web as well as humans.
This piece consists of seven small sections, two performers stand center stage, an infrared camera captures their gestures, and feeds the image into the software Max, which manipulates it into an abstract “Rorschach image.” The image is then projected behind the performers. An invited audience member serves as the interpreter to say two or three keywords out loud, based on his or her first reaction to that image. Three testers then feed these words into the search engines of four different mainstream websites (New York Times, Google Images, Youtube, CNN). The screens of the computers performing these searches are projected into the performance space, and the audience sees the search process and results. The performers then assume a physical posture that corresponds to the search results, based on their first, direct bodily reaction to the search results. The physical postures are interpretive, but serve as the embodiment of the projected Web contents. The infrared camera captures this change, and generate a new “Rorschach image” to restart the cycle anew.
Audience members have the chance to go through the whole psychological testing process from human consciousness to the Web consciousness and make an interesting comparison.
In two widely-known psychological tests—the Rorschach test and word association—subjects' perceptions of and reactions to some given information are recorded and then analyzed via a psychological interpretation. The most important point is that both of these tests and the analyses are based on a person’s first reaction to some feeds of information, not his or her response after thinking. In the Rorschach test, the feed is some set of inkblot-like images; in word association it is words.
Both of the tests show the brain’s crucial function: the search engine, where we can notice the Web has seemingly the same or similar mechanism as a human mind does. Almost any mainstream website has its own embedded search engine, that always responds directly to what you feed to it. And the search results, no matter if they are articles, news, images or videos, are all based on the relevance to the feed.
And these two well-established psychological tests, once only applied to test humans, are now applied in this piece to test the Web as well as humans.
This piece consists of seven small sections, two performers stand center stage, an infrared camera captures their gestures, and feeds the image into the software Max, which manipulates it into an abstract “Rorschach image.” The image is then projected behind the performers. An invited audience member serves as the interpreter to say two or three keywords out loud, based on his or her first reaction to that image. Three testers then feed these words into the search engines of four different mainstream websites (New York Times, Google Images, Youtube, CNN). The screens of the computers performing these searches are projected into the performance space, and the audience sees the search process and results. The performers then assume a physical posture that corresponds to the search results, based on their first, direct bodily reaction to the search results. The physical postures are interpretive, but serve as the embodiment of the projected Web contents. The infrared camera captures this change, and generate a new “Rorschach image” to restart the cycle anew.
Audience members have the chance to go through the whole psychological testing process from human consciousness to the Web consciousness and make an interesting comparison.
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