INFORMATION SPACE AND NEUROSCIENCE
                                                                 

SCHIZOPHRENIA AND REALITY

 "The images are disturbing but valuable, They've pushed Thompson toward the theory that schizophrenia is a disrupted version of normal brain development... Paul Thompson, 31 year old British Emigrant at UCLA, is unabashedly excited... Over five years, Thompson saw a 'pervasive, unrelenting wave of tissue loss that swept forward like a forest fire,' eventually engulfing the sides and front of the brain. By 18, the teenagers had lost 25 percent of their gray matter in certain brain areas..." For more on the damage that wrecks the illusion of a single consciousness, and breaks the barrier between external and internal reality (tho' no suggestion of paranormal powers I hasten to add ), try the image link.

The first time I wrote about immersions, it was in an Ann Halam book called The Powerhouse. There are burned-out rockstars who fooled around with Black Magic in there too... It's about a teenage techno band, experimenting with visual and digital effects, who get involved with a demon that's infesting the derelict industrial building they use as rehearsal space. "Immersions", however, are the full-body experience art created by the ex-nun who plays the Van Helsing role.      

Machinima.... An art form that comes out of nowhere. Films that use computer game technology and look like "Toy Story". Zero-budget film-makers making films that would stretch the biggest of Hollywood studios... Probably where the real world Janelle Firdous is working, right now-

INFORMATION THEORY: Claude Shannon, co-author with Warren Weaver of The Mathematical Theory Of Communication 1948/63, research mathematician at Bell laboratories from 1941, conceived of information as a measurable physical quantity, like density or mass, expressed in on/off yes/no 'bits', irrespective of the content of a 'message': an immensely powerful insight, one of the foundations of our digital age.

Newton and the Knitting Needle
(the real world source of all those eye-socket gadgets... eeeugh)

"I tooke a bodkine, & put it betwixt my eye & the bone as neare the backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with the end of it, so as to make the curvature a, bcdef in my eye, there appeared several white and darke coloured circles..."
Newton's notebooks c.1665

Suffer, birdone...
When the lads were going wild over Castaneda, (especially if they hadn't read a book all the way through since Primary school), we freaky lasses were divided between those who doted on Sylvia Plath's I hate myself autobio, (The BellJar) and those such as myself who considered this book to be gospel. Hannah Green says "There is no creativity in madness", & I believe her; but this is art. Critics say: "Seldom has the strange and seductive world of insanity been charted more explicitly, or more beautifully... " You want this? Your best bet seems to be the Pan 1991 paperback, available on amazon.co.uk

DIGITISING THE REAL WORLD, BIT BY FING BIT-
"To process a particular scene, the film is digitised and then the first and last frames of the scene are extracted. Every object in the two frames is labelled with shades of grey -objects in the foreground are white while those in the background are black, for example, and and intelligent algorithm then analyses the two scenes and learns the depth relationships between the objects. Once it had the depth information for the first and last frames the software then creates depth maps for all the intermediate frames. You end up with the 2D image unchanged, says Yewdall, but you also know exactly where every pixel should be positioned from the viewer's perspective..."
                                                  From an article in New Scientist, October 2003, Jonathan Fildes on the state of the art at Sanyo on 3D TV

Also see Francis Spufford's account of the creation of the first mobile phone cell, the brute radio mapping of a landscape-