Archive for October, 2006

from individual memory to weltgeist

We normally do not think on past events as a sequence of facts. Of course we always put them on a sequence, but it is a sequence weaved by semantic aspects. As an example, we could think about the best restaurant somebody has been to. The person who is trying to remember it firstly could think of a restaurant he had been to in one year and after he could perhaps remember another restaurant he had been two years later. That one that he actually would consider the best. But where are all the things that happened between those two points?

One way to analyze how those semantic aspects of history are built, is to analyze how semantic connections are created by remembering personal facts. Hegel developed the concept of Weltgeist (”World Spirit”), that is effected in history through the mediation of various Volksgeist (”Folk Spirits”).

According to Hegel, World History are dialectic steps that allways leads to larger liberty. In this historical process the subjective consciousness and the individual will of many individuals are overcome and waived in a collective consciousness with general and free will, which carries out itself in a civil state.

In this sense, I decided to start my analysis of History taking into account the individual perspective, passing through the theme Community Memory to finnaly approach World Wide History.

 

cute communication

What about if couples could communicate through those symbolic presents they use to exchange? Like that cute teddy bear that stands on the shelf…

The PlayPal is acctually designed for children to share multimedia experiences and virtual co-presence. When a child at one location moves one doll’s hands, the remote synchronized doll moves its hands in the same way. The dolls alone communicate only by gestures. Each child has a set of tokens that are used as the dolls’ accessories. When a token is placed in a doll’s hands, it functions as a different communicating tool.

playpals1.jpg

Bonnanni et al. | MIT Media Lab | 2006
http://web.media.mit.edu/~amerigo/playpals.htm