These are my notes from the talk by Nedine Kachornnamsong – Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine.
Copenhagen Airport project, In Place-Spective, 2005-2006
- Airports are transitional spaces without special meaning to people – it’s a non-place. So how can we construct a place inside an airport?
- So what’s a sense of place? It’s hard to share and compare your sense of place with each other. Architectural approach might not be the best way to do it.
- Sense of place doesn’t have to be attached to a physical space. It’s more of a virtual construct based on social interaction.
- The problem: you don’t want to socialize, because you’re in the transit; your’ve very vulnerable and you care only about your travels.
Posters inside washrooms, that you can use to share things with each other. The posters were placed inside toilet doors.
- The Ghost in the machine is used to criticize the idea of dualism by Descartes. Dualism – the body is just a vehicle of the mind. By having a belief that body is a slave the mind, it’s the same as saying that we’re just a ghost in the machine.
- It’s about how you define the humanity – separation of human and being, human vs. animal. Animals are locked into instincts while humans are of free will.
- Animal is the machine, while human is the ghost in the machine; meaning that we’re ghost of the animal.
The Living Machine
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Haraway Reader. 1985. Ed. Haraway, Donna. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7-45.
This new machine becomes a problem because it comes very close to the concept of humanity. So we need to redefine what it means to be a human.
Yes/No/Maybe
Pyshical event that takes elements from the online dating site:
- Anonymity
- Degree of interest
- Object of desire (something that you can interact with)
Look for it in near future in Ljubljana.