The ‘useful’ notes I’ve left myself, to reconstruct what happened on day twenty-four (now a full four weeks ago), run a little something like ‘woo hoo! It’s almost Christmas!’. So, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from both my past and current self. From what I remember, it was a whirlwind of a busy day- I met with Peggy from UNESCO City of Literature and discovered that not only had we met at a reading in the summer but that we also studied English Literature as undergrads at St Andrews University, a year apart. Peggy was able to tell me about a whole bunch of fascinating creative/literary projects which have been been happening across Edinburgh in the last few years – such as Carry A Poem – and also give me some details about forthcoming projects such as the use of dynamic mapping for the enLIGHTen project which will be launching in 2012. As well as wanting to hear about the different literary/ writing activities in Edinburgh, I also have a strong research interest in Creative Interventions, and Edinburgh happens to be a particularly active and innovative city in this field.
The second part of the Motion perception experiment happened; a repeat of the day before. Afterwards I was asked to fill in a questionnaire about what I thought the experiment was testing, and how I thought the programme was altering/ rewarding my choices. Then Clem told me the inside track on on what they were actually trying to test, which was something along the lines of whether the brain is optimistic or pessimistic in response to a reward system. The hypothesis so far is that the brain has a tendency towards optimism. Which is nice.
Bob Fisher and I met to talk through his manuscript (which I was halfway through reading), but ended up spending the time talking about his research instead, especially his work on machine recognition of fish, identifying different types of skin cancer, and the difficulties of robot sonar. I have several pages of notes on all of those which i’m hoping will transform into stories somepoint in the near future. And that’s the end of my factual account of the day, which feels to be a fairly boring description rather than an interpretation. Which will teach me not to go on holiday with work still hanging o’er my head… I also edited and uploaded a couple more videos from the weekend, and had various conversations with people about how dinner parties worked and how different space-interactions might function on the sphere.
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Viccy Adams 