“In these systems, the user learns, kinesthetically and proprioceptively, that the relevant boundaries for interaction are defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a technobio integrated circuit.”

“What transformations govern the connections between user and avatar? What parameters control the construction of the screen world? What patterns can the user discover through interaction with the system? Where do these patterns fade into randomness? What stimuli cannot be encoded within the system and therefore exist only as extraneous noise? When and how does this noise coalesce into pattern?”

“Working from a different theoretical framework, Allucquere Roseanne Stone has proposed that one need not enter virtual reality to encounter these questions, although VR brings them vividly into the foreground. Merely communicating by email or participating in a text-based MUD (multi-user dungeon) already problematizes thinking of the body as a self- evident physicality.6 In the face of such technologies, Stone proposes that we think of subjectivity as a multiple warranted by the body rather than contained within it. Sherry Turkle, in her faSCinating work on people who spend serious time in MUDs, convincingly shows that virtual technologies, in a riptide of reverse influence, affect how real life is seen. "Reality is not my best window," one of her respondents remarks.7”

“Gregory Bateson brought the point home when he puzzled his graduate students with a question koan like in its simplicity, asking if a blind man's cane is part of the man. 1 The question aimed to spark a mind-shift. Most of his students thought that human boundaries are naturally defined byepidermal surfaces. Seen from the cybernetic perspective coalescing into awareness during and after World War II, however, cybernetic systems are constituted by Hows of information. In this view point,cane and man join in a Single system, for the cane funnels to the man essential information about his environment. The same is true of a hearing aid for a deaf person, a voice synthesizer for someone with impaired speech, and a helmet with a voice- activated firing control for a fighter pilot.”

A few sections taken from N. Katherine Hayles "How We Became Posthuman" that I believe would be really interesting to explore within the project, thinking in terms of artificial intelligence, artificial life and avatars.