Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
hack the experience Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from ded- icated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a wel- coming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) hack the experience: new tools for artists from cognitive science. Copyright © 2018 Ryan Dewey. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your re- build under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2018 by Brainstorm Books An imprint of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-65-3 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-66-0 (ePDF) lccn: 2018945514 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei HACK THE EXPERIENCE New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science RYAN DEWEY Brainstorm Books Santa Barbara, California Contents Introduction 9 Chapters Tools 1. Breaking Down Experiences to Find Backdoors for Hacking 15 2. Control Attention 19 3. Experience Hacking Is Fundamentally a Form of Design 31 4. Your Cognitive Toolbox 41 1. Spatial Arrangement & Schematic Structures 45 2. Cognitive Simulation 51 3. Viewpoint 55 4. Embodiment 71 5. Motion 81 6. Senses 85 7. Emotion and Perception 101 5. Story, World Building, and Belief 109 6. Tying Things Together: Paths & Nodes 125 7. Documentation for Planning, Archiving, and Reproducing 137 8. Making This Work in a Museum or Gallery 145 Bibliography 151 Introduction Artists and scientists do the same thing: they observe some- suspicion. This in part comes from the content of the work, partly thing, analyze their observations, and present their fi ndings in a from the context, partly from the execution, partly from the past ex- way that untrained people can see with relative ease what the artist periences and openness of the audience, and partly from scores of or scientist worked to see in their own analyses. other factors. All art evokes responses. “My kid could do that” is a The core argument of this book centers on the premise that art response, and, like it or not, it is a valid response that was evoked by is a form of cognitive engineering and that the physical environ- the work. The goal of this book is to help you shape the viewers’ ex- ment (or objects in the physical environment) can be shaped using perience to leverage basic cognition and attention patterns to push empirically validated models from cognitive science to maximize people toward a set of responses you want to evoke. For instance, emotional and sensory experience. Like the title suggests, this is a if you want to create a feeling of remoteness in the middle of a city, kind of hacking. As the book unfolds, this kind of hacking will take the tools in this book will help you evoke that feeling by showing you various environmental resources and interventions and apply them which perceptual elements you need to shape in the physical space to different conditions (emotions, senses, general experience, etc.), and how. in order to design integrated experiences that help awaken your au- Disciplines like new media studies, neuroscience, biosemiotics, dience in new ways. and data studies already defi ne signifi cant corners of the contem- Cognitive engineering blends the role of artist and scientist into porary art world, so there is a context for creating experiences that a process of building experiences that evoke responses of some make sense out of the body and the brain. This book contributes kind. This book will give you a toolkit for planning experiences and to that effort by putting ideas together that can move your exist- events of all sorts and will guide you through the process of bring- ing creative practice up onto new levels of experiential grounding ing elements of cognitive engineering into your creative practice. and perceptual relevance. It is designed for people who are actively After reading this short book, your work will help your audience working on projects, and it intervenes into your creative process like connect with your work in more meaningful and memorable ways. a critic and a consultant, guiding you with new insights into your Cognitive engineering in this sense provides a way to promote process of creation. This book is dense, like a bullion cube of con- inquiry, and to make people curious about the world. The ex- cepts and methods. It is good advice to read this book at least twice, periences you design will inform the way that people live in the and to read it while working on specifi c projects. Also, as soon as world and make meaning in their day-to-day life. you learn a concept from this book, try to teach it to someone, ex- Artists naturally evoke responses from their viewing audience, plaining it in your own words so as to further solidify the concept in such as the visceral responses of disgust, of joy, and also cogni- your own memory. tive responses of indifference, bewilderment, confusion, hatred, or 9 hack the experience This guide is also useful to people working in museums and gal- context in which you have your perspective — your experience (first leries. In the turn toward experience in museum interpretation, this sense) of an experience (second sense). guide makes sense of the ways that audiences engage with stories This second sense of experiences includes things like perfor- told through juxtaposition, organization, and collection, helping to mances, gallery exhibits, parties, festivals, events, happenings, im- bring an outside eye to curatorial practice. Creating experiences mersive theater, installations, new media art, pop-up spaces, sta- from the ground up in a requirements-driven process lets experience ble architecture, urban fabric, cultural narratives, and virtual and designers play around with a variety of methods to engage the pub- physical worlds. They can even be small-scale, private events like lic on emotional, visceral, and cognitive levels. It makes sense then to brushing your teeth, or drinking a glass of water, but they can also have some understanding of the way general cognition affects expe- be massive in scale, like the string of activities involved in rebranding rience to better exhibit certain works, and to design exhibitions that post-industrial cities. Experience can be shaped as it scales up or down. better expose the relationship between cognition and experience. Experiences can easily be expanded to include theme park de- Outside of the gallery in the applied arts (like design), engineer- sign, museums, restaurants, brand encounters, advertising cam- ing response-evoking user experiences is also a large part of brand paigns, and film. An experience can take place in a single location development, and this simple guide can even serve as a playbook (such as a standard event or party) or it can extend over several for designing transformational experiences that add perceptually locations (such as a hike or even a tourist walk). An experience can relevant texture to brand narratives. While the focus of this book is have a single audience or a very large audience. It can have one or art installation, the presented ideas equally apply to building stories many goals, it can consist of one activity or many activities, it can and worlds, whether for scripts, storyboards, or game design. occur once and be over or it can extend over a long period of time, What constitutes “hacking”? Hacking in this book is an interven- sequentially in some predetermined order or ad hoc as determined tion that organizes the physical world in a way that leverages natu- by happenstance or by the random paths of audience encounter. ral cognitive structures to evoke some kind of response in the viewer. There are no limits to the characteristics of experience, except for It’s “hacking” because it is a kind of short-cut into a mental state the requirement that it has to happen somewhere to someone at through various openings in the body-mind-experience system. some time and it has to do something to that person, such as evoke What exactly does “experience” mean? This word has two sens- a response. es in focus here. First, experience refers to the fabric of moments Experiences in the first sense happen whether or not experienc- in general. Second, and more specifically, experience refers to your es in the second sense exist at all. But experiences in the second neural integration of stimuli in the environment to create your per- sense are designed to intentionally influence first-sense expe- ception of a moment in time. This first sense is the perceived state: rience.