I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Lift organization team for the amazing job done and the Lifters for the active participation. I also would like to warmly thank the Gebert Rüf Stiftung fellowship program for giving us, poor students of all around Europe, the opportunity to actively participate to this insightful event. Finally a great thanks to the workshop organizers for the enriching sessions.

Keep up the good work, the chaos and the fondue :)

When we looked at the audience in the middle of Paul Barnett's "show", We did not see any of the lifter on their laptop. All heads were turned towards the scene where this talkative gesturing guy was talking about his trip to Las Vegas, slightly drawing parrallels with game industry. I was used to his podcasts and his presentation was far beyond that. What's really impressive is that he managed not to talk about the product he is contributing to design, Warhammer Online as did some other speakers being there for the sake of the slightly hidden advertisement. He is probably hugely contributing to the whole buzz around this new "post-World-of-Warcraft" product that is Warhammer Online. After a so amazing communication job done around this game, I really hope (and I'm probably not alone) that the product will be as impressive as the buzz piggybacked by the personality that is Paul Barnett.

I was looking forward to hear the talk of Kevin "Cyborg" Warwick and as I expected, it was "tremendously exciting". The guy with neural chips as "bling-bling" gadgets completely rocked and placed the bar really high this second Lift-day. In few words, Warwick and his wife were implanted with chips connected to their neural system during 3 months of intense experimentation. He was, among others, able to remotely send "signals" to a computer and by extension through internet to a robot or his wife. He also was able to receive "signals" transformed into electrical impulses. He was thus able to "extend his sensory range" and detect (feel) objects located around him (it took 6 weeks to his brain to learn to interpret the electrical impulse). Tremendously exciting!!

I quite appreciated the short talk by Jonathan Cabiria, a psychologist and researcher who claims that real life and virtual life is overlapping by a process of permeability. The idea is not really new and a brief psychological research (in the clinical way of the term) allow us to figure out how the borders between these two worlds become thin in the mind of users that put some of their identity in a virtual world. This notion of identity becomes then the crux aspect of the model. Building upon self-presentation approaches such as Irwing Goffman's theory of social re-presentation, the speaker sustain the idea that we present ourselves in a certain way depending on the context (social and physical I may add). Why that? It's essentially a matter of surviving (not physically but socially and culturally), to find connections, bounds, in other words, we need to feel this sense of belonging. If this fails, we would be marginalized and all the implications it can have. Teenegers are in a really sensitive to this indentification processes and usually the way they construct their own identity passes through an overidentification of themselves (EMO-kids, Piercings, Vampyres) which is a "a way to say: "fuck you: this is what I am".