Presenters: Sheron Wray, Fleeta Siegel & Anna B. Scott

Monday, February 22
2:45 - 3:45 pm
Calit2 Auditorium

This session will provide BodyTech participants an opportunity to experience a cell phone as a communal computational device through an innovative theater technique designed by Sheron Wray UCI/Texterritory. Co-presented with Fleeta Siegel, Texterritory’s co-developer/Kingston University, London.

In his novel The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson envisioned a world of computational immersion, with humans serving as processor hosts, or 'ractors. Though "optimized wetware" is still simplistic (implanted RFID), we are in the midst of this fact: humans are interactive data sets that are at once searchable and computational via the cell phone. One of their drawbacks, which programmers the world over have been immersed in solving for the last 3 yrs, is the tendency for phone culture to "extract" a data set from any given equation/situation; that is, people using cell phones tend to fall out of social interaction, rather than become more deeply immersed in it. Communication via cell phone can therefore become a very isolating and intrusive experience.