Perry Hoberman & Donald Hoffman's project "Malperception" explores the way in which the human brain constructs reality based on data collected by sensing organs, and that while sometimes wrong takes are caused by failure to collect information about reality, quite often malperception occurs during the brain's translation of that information.
This controlling idea is apparent in an engaging and pedagogical context. The research is clearly extensive and the multimedia format allows each phenomenon to be divulged in its own respective manner.
The web exhibition is proportional to the project in that one can easily jump around from a static menu bar. Each link leads to a considerable amount of textual information that has been boiled down from its original state and broken up into short paragraphs and surrounded by images that keep it from feeling uninviting or daunting.
Overall the project does a great job at taking a large amount of information and making it easily browsed and digested. The one problem is that its supplemental interactive Shockwave demonstrations of the malperception principles being discussed are incompatible with new Mac computers running on Intel chipsets until Adobe updates the old macromedia plugins or Mac updates its OS.
- Dustin, Alexis, Xing
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-Good assembly of intriguing visual abnormalities. Some more well-known, others less so- occurence of prosopagnosia,
for instance, well-documented in the literature. Point of concern is that with regrads to the lesser-known conditions, some
of which the viewer may not have heard of before, hard to assess their verifiability- site has the general appearance of
fact mixed with fiction.
-Also, some accompanying pictures could be slightly misleading- eg, image of grotesque werewolf-like head
accompanying paraprosopia description- in picture, entire head is transformed by internal representation, whereas
disorder sufferers only report transformation of part of head.
-Many reports presumably based on anecdotal evidence, since conditions very rare and techniques for measurement
hard to devise. Possibly sufficient for general audience who just wants brief introduction to fascinating and diverse range
of syndromes, but as a resource for those who want further info, would be enhanced if extensive citations and links to
background literature were provided.
ps. the plugin worked on my laptop and most worked very well as visual demonstrations but there were a couple i didn't
get, spots didn't appear at higher frequencies as they were supposed to..not sure whether that was primarily my problem.
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