Talk

New York City, NY December 10, 2016
Incredible Witness: Findings from the Public Laboratory

Incredible Witness is a public laboratory that asks: how can people ever be “credible witnesses” when even the most basic perceptions, such as color vision or spatial awareness, differ drastically from person to person? We live in a historical period where many traditional binaries are breaking down. Some of the most basic assumptions about social life and hierarchies are fragmenting--ideas around gender, race, sexuality, and ability are being questioned and re-framed. Incredible Witness seeks to encourage this disintegration, and find ways of learning to accept each other fully, beyond the categories. In the Incredible Witness laboratory, we invite people into unusual perceptual worlds to bring home viscerally how different each person’s experience of the world can be, using games and game-based environments. Our talk will review the results of our participatory experiments and point to future activities.