Blowing Out Lanterns

To celebrate mine and Neko’s return to the land of the intertubes, I bring you:

The Kage Roi Idea Acceleration Chamber. (and no, this is not a Star Trek prop).

An IT company in Japan called Kayac working in conjunction with researchers of a notable Japanese university, have developed this mock up of a room designed specifically for the stimulation of the mind’s own tendency to free associate. In essence, a room that monitors keywords spoken aloud and automatically trawls the web looking for associated data and imagery, which it then feeds back to the room’s inhabitants in an ongoing cycle of revision and adaptation.

Now, while the company is planning on marketing this to content creation companies to aid in brainstorming sessions, I for one find the underlying principle behind what they’re developing a source of pure fascination. Think for a moment…if we assume the cloud as we’ve come to experience it represents a vast source of human data (and it does, Wired recently did an article on the Death of the Scientific theory in light of the sheer amount of data now available. Check it out, it’s worth reading.) what we’re really lacking is an interface that allows us to move associatively through that data. That’s what’s so fascinating about this; it’s a manner in which we may engage humanly with this vast compendium of living data. BOL was predicated on the belief that the human mind, unleashed from the constraints of daily consciousness, was capable of the most amazing and beautiful (and possibly zombified) creations. It occurs to me that as our overall level of technology matures, we will necessarily develop tools such as this to enable us to interact with it in the most natural manner possible. And what could be more natural than our own mind’s tendency to wander?

found via Pink Tentacle

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Tags: Aesthetiophilia //