CPS - Week 5 - Objects Are Not Exhausted

CONTEXT

During Max’s presentation to the class, discussing the restrictive nature of humans consistently placing themselves at the centre of existence, I noticed the apple logo on the back of a machine in the class and thought, words really are quite redundant at this point. A computer isn’t an apple, and yet it is.

I’m constantly intrigued by the idea of words as sounds rather than designators of objects, it got me thinking about that weird thing that happens when you say a word so much it starts to sound wrong. So I researched this phenomenon known as “semantic satiation”, and thought that perhaps I could trigger this as a way of showing how silly our idea of naming objects really is.

METHOD

Using Unity I would attempt to create a simple interaction that saturates a users mind with a single word causing it to lose all meaning.

RESPONSE

As it turns out Unity is hard. While attempting to set up an interaction that I thought would provide an interesting exercise in just what happens when you click on the same word too many times, I ended up sinking far more time into trying to script buttons and animations.

In the end I decided that I simply wasn’t going to get anything out of it, and instead created a video “mock-up” of my intention. During the creation of this I was finally able to see just how mundane the interaction in the game would be, which was brilliant. I thought that by adding a very monotonous voice repeating the word as well it would prove even more effective an experiment.