Received this image yesterday from Ren:
A couple of things struck me about this image in relation to the digital. One is the presence of the cat which has become a ubiquitous part of cybercultures. The other is the title of the research report being read and the contents I later discovered. The use of an eye-tracking system to determine attention towards faces is reminiscent of Blade Runner’s cyborg eye test:
There are some highly problematic elements to this research. Particularly around the idea that emotions are conveyed through faces and that these are somehow universal expressions rather than socially constructed.
Lisa Feldman Barret’s recent book attempts to debunk a lot of the prevailing ‘research’ into this area. She received a lot of flack for questioning the prevailing belief that the amygdala is the seat of our fear response or that there are specific areas of the brain which are in charge of specific behaviours/emotions/responses.
This negative response to her work seems to have some parallel with the attitude to the mind & brain that Hayles (1999) discusses at the start of ‘Towards embodied virutality‘. That is, it is just information and networks of communication which could potentially be replicated to produce our androids or cyborgs and the AI that may inhabit them.
