I am very interested in art and interaction in education. So the feedback loop idea that I am playing around with will be implemented in an educational environment and will be intended to perpetuate a certain knowledge based desire and prompt those in its environment to imagine more.
There is a staggering disparity between the number of students in a school, high school for example, and the number of which actually graduates– as well as the number that attend college–or the number that actually go out into the world and become successful(and I not measuring success by monetary accomplishment).
The imagination is very much linked to accomplishment. If you can see yourself doing it, then it can happen. What I mean is, and there have been studies on this theory, that a child in an impoverish environment, where say the only images of success they see are drug dealers, proves this child a hard time imagining diploma + hard work(at the very minimum)= success. Example is a very strong factor in the early development of children and teens.
An interview with Dr. Mae C. Jemison(the first black woman in space), sort of speaks to this she explains that the image of a black woman on star trek is really what opened the idea, so that she could even imagine making this dream manifest. It was the imagine of someone she could identify with, someone that looked like her.
There are a lack of these types of images in the world. I want to create a bank of images of an array of ethnicities displayed in images of graduation and many different fields and professions where there is a general lack in public images. Technological fields, sciences, arts, etc, etc. There will be the obscure and highly specialized.
This will play in a little slide show on a small screen triggered by face detection. This is to be placed near the interior entrance of schools, (one example of a placement area…one high school that I attended had metal detectors at the entrance so one screen could be placed near the line to go through the metal detector is, etc, etc)
so basically the slide show of these images will be trigger to start when a face is detected within a certain distance of the screen. (further development would maybe trigger a separate slide show based on sex: so is a female is detected images of females will be displayed and vice versa)
This is meant to encourage students.
The images will also be mixed with a few piece of text, very short, but probably action words of encouragement.
I feel it is important to have something of this nature at the entrance of schools because:
so many students skip class–maybe this small encouragement will deter their truancy
the dropout rate is devastatingly high…
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Some information on visual perception:
Discussing Visual Perception there is an idea of Unconscious inference:
“Hermann von Helmholtz is often credited with the first study of visual perception in modern times. Helmholtz examined the human eye and concluded that it was, optically, rather poor. The poor-quality information gathered via the eye seemed to him to make vision impossible. He therefore concluded that vision could only be the result of some form of unconscious inferences: a matter of making assumptions and conclusions from incomplete data, based on previous experiences.
Inference requires prior experience of the world.”
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