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?

Laying-on of Hands

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

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)