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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The artist Mark Farid is preparing to become someone else for a month. In a fascinating experiment, currently seeking support on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, he plans to take up residence in a London gallery, don a virtual reality headset and noise-cancelling earphones, and give over his senses to a single incoming feed.
This feed will be provided by “the other”, a volunteer who will wear a pair of spectacles equipped with cameras that record everything they do from the first-person perspective and send this live to Farid’s headset. The artist will have no other contact with humans. He will live in the experience of this other person.
The point is discover how adaptable the brain is to another physical body – and whether our sense of self comes from inherent personality or cultural identity. It is, of course, a question philosophy has toyed with for hundreds of years: is the body a mere sensory vessel for the brain, or is identity inextricably linked to its physical manifestation?
