jleblanc: cinematic objects

11.14.06: Thinking about an Emotional interface
One night last week I felt myself plagued with insomnia. I had kindly let my girlfriend choose which blanket she wanted and she choose my down comforter. I thought I would be able to sleep despite having imbibed a coke earlier that day (I am very sensitive to such things). However, by four in the morning I was tossing and turning, and yearned for sleep. It was like a terrible thirst, and I felt that the only thing that could quench it, that could cool the heat of my overheating mind was that blanket, the one she had wrapped around her. So after about fifteen minutes of staring into the darkness with this realization running in my head, I tapped her and asked her, could I please have the blanket, I am so tired and I can't sleep. She murmured fine, and I exchanged blankets and within ten minutes I fell asleep.

In the interim there, this assignment was one of the many things bouncing around in my head, and I came to think about the concept of an interface to sleep.
How is this emotional? Well, what keeps me from sleeping besides just caffeine? Thinking about Girls, Events of the Day, Excitement that won't abate... very emotional things. In fact when I cannot sleep I try to drain myself of emotion, try to meditate (I do a poor job in any state of consciousness), try to think about mundane forests, once recreated the bike ride from my old house in Cambridge to my parents house (a 30 mile trip which I actually did recreate without falling asleep), try to think about single colors... all useless (except for cough medicine when I am sick, or sometimes a loud fan and earplugs)..
Insomnia doesn't strike me often enough or severely enough for me to really work at developing methods to deal with it, but enough that it is often on my mind.

Which brings me back to that blanket. Is it an interface to sleep? Is it a catalyst for sleep? What about the fan and earplugs? As I write this, the more I realize that they are sort of catalysts more than they are interfaces. They serve as blankets of noise to cover the little things in the background that keep me awake (interesting how in this use of the word, we are not covering ourself but covering the thing outside ourselves). They are anti-emotional-interfaces, layers designed to insulate me from emotion, layers to disrupt my engagement with my mind.

Ariel and I had an interesting conversation regarding interfaces and what they are. Interfaces are boundaries between two things, an intervening layer. But from there the components of the definition get complex. For the purposes of this discussion, on one side of the interface is the "user", and on the other is the "content."

But what purpose does this layer serve? It can be a guide, or a route through a system.
Let me think about the google search page. When I was talking with Ariel I initially described it as an autistic interface. This word wasn't quite what I meant, but it is the closest I could think of. Google is a single text box. It is friendly and cheerful looking. But it has no opinions at first look. You can type anything into it. It gives you no suggestions, it seems as if it could care less. You hit search and sure it finds all kinds of good stuff, but it has no opinion on your search terms unless you misspell something.
There is a new google search bar in Firefox, and what is interesting about it is that as you type a word it makes auto suggestions. So you type "china", and suddenly this list appears with a series of modifying words: "town" "trips" "airlines" "news" "government" ....
It doesn't quite have any emotion yet, but it does seem more eager, more interested in what you want to find.

But I don't really care about Google, or even computer interfaces. So returning to the idea of sleep.

How can I interface with my sleep? One of these issues here is that for me an interface to sleep must not require me to actively participate with it. The more I am concious of my need/desire to sleep, the less I will be able to do it. But can you passively interact with an interface, and still have that thing be an interface?
Say for example I have a video camera pointing at my bed, and it looks at whether I am still or not. If it sees that I am moving every once in a while, indicating I am tossing and turning, maybe it decides to play a quiet piece of music to help me sleep, to take my mind out of whatever it is that I am thinking about. Or it tells me, get up and do some work and then try to fall asleep again. Or hook into the Redial phone.

11.7.06: Site work: Oriental Pavilion
proposal
site