the audience, shortening even more the alternate nature of the emotional
reaction time. Johnstone associates the use of masks in the threatening
environment of improvisation with trance,
an ecstatic state derived from the combination of the alteration of the
sensori-motor experience with the immediacy of the emotional circuitry.
We see then that
Stanislavski and Johnstone have expressed a model which is as close as can be
to trust-based interactions. The actors must trust their reactions as well as
that as their co-actors and the audience, and the policies that support this
trust are implemented in a ready manner thanks to appropriate training. The
impromptu plot that frames the improvisation allows the dynamic development of
a script that conveys a message of communion that the director, the actors, and
other participants carry to the audience. If theater performance is indeed a
metaphor of our everyday interaction experience, this argues for searching for
the unifying scripts, or myths, that serve to convey the message of the group
to another group in a shared version of alternate consciousness based on the
trust that the actors and the audience develop to sustain the rhythm of the
lesson. The study of the constitution of such modern myths has been developed
in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. The
improvisation model of theatrical performance allows to more generally look at
performance as a group experience formed around a common myth that can be
deconstructed and understood as a model of community building, an exercise that
we have already alluded to regarding Victor Turner’s work in The Anthropology of Performance.
In this book,
Turner borrows from the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep the term liminality, which characterizes the
passage from one identity to another, for the actor from the here and now of
one deictic state to the here and now of another one, that of the masked
character. The term would apply in the trust infrastructure of networks where
identities may represent different persons, or different personalities of a
person. When we pay with our credit card, we appear to the network as clients
of a bank; when we access our workplace with a badge waved at a sensor at the
door, we are an employee; and when we call with our cellular phone, we are one
subscriber to a telephone operator. In the same way the wearing of the mask and
body ornaments changes the sensori-motor experience of the mask wearer and
brings an external stimulus to liminality, the presentation of digital identity
associates a new presence interfaced through its own sensori-motor
capabilities, with a personality embodied in its hardware and software. Each
such identity allow us to change role in our daily plays, and liminality
appears as a concept illustrating that transcendent personal devices represent
us in various sensori-motor capabilities with representations that are images
of subsets, and sometimes supersets, of our own capabilities. In the same way
as we have a different persona in personal, professional, public or other
aspects of our life, we have different personae in each of our digital network
presentations. It is immediately apparent that the acting that we request from
our transcendent personal devices should tend towards providing the same
capabilities as that observed in the theater. From our perspective, at every
level of our interaction with the network, we are driven by a plot that the
transcendent personal device needs to convey in the scene that is our window
into the society of computers and other humans behind them. We have seen that
secure cores and transcendent personal device understand trust, can implement
policies, and have sensori-motor experiences that can be mediated by reactions
based on their hierarchy of needs. Are they ready for improvisation?
During the
journey of this book, we have considered wide scale changes among living
organisms brought by evolution coupled with natural selection. With respect to
such changes, while the mechanics of observation might suggest schism, the
actual mechanics of change suggest
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