Immersion Project

This picture comes from a visual artist whose work I stumbled across in Robbie Cooper's blog with regard to a new project that he is working on called the Immersion project. 7 photos from the project are featured in The New York Times.

About “Immersion”;

Immersion is a project that records video of people “through the screen” as they play games, use the internet and watch TV. There’s three of us involved in the actual production of the footage- Andrew Wiggins is a camera man based in London, whilst Charly Smith is a First Assistant Director, also based in London. In 2009 we’ll be working with the Media Center at Bournemouth University, on an 18 month study called “War and Leisure”, of teenagers and war in the media. Using the Facial Action Coding System, developed by Paul Ekman, we’ll be analysing the reactions of teenagers to war in video games, movies, news footage, documentaries and online video. Outside of this study we’re also filming people consuming a range of media- everything from the shopping channel, porn, sports, to programming created for babies.

As a gamer myself, the facial expression or premise of the whole project must have struck a chord. In many ways, the mind state that I enter (and I suspect most gamers enter) when playing a good game is so unlike that of my experience in any other context. I'm sure that there are researchers out there who are studying the effects of this "in the zone" state of being on imprinting and neural activation. I happen to know almost nothing about it, but thought it was interesting and will probably scrounge around on Cooper's blog for a bit to see if he can't enlighten me.

Barring that, the photo shoot is still a lot of fun.