The sounds that we hear combined with the images that we see and the consequences of our actions affect how we perceive our world, how our consciousness functions and how we act. The realistic visuals and behaviors in interactive media (such as video games) provide a compelling platform for communicating experience, transforming consciousness and influencing behavior.

Interactive media represents the latest form of expression which, going back in time, was the vehicle for mythology, art, and ritual. The origins of mythology, art, and ritual were to provide meaning and context in life. The effectiveness of media and its ability to influence emotion (and motivate action) is already commonly applied by advertising companies to sway consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Meaningful Media is a one-day invitational workshop that brings together media creators such as film-makers, video game producers, and media technology developers, consciousness researchers, and entrepreneurs to stimulate further collaboration and promote the understanding and development of media content and technologies that facilitate personal growth and transformation.

For example, the Workshop will consider how media can be structured to:

• serve similar cultural functions to myth, art and ritual, including for example, enabling users to experience and explore:
     • the potential of particular worldviews to provide meaning and purpose for human existence;
     • the effectiveness of different forms of social organization;
     • the usefulness of alternative motivations and behavioral strategies in a variety of contexts;
     • better ways of being and living in the world; and
     • the reframing of unconscious motivations and cognitive processes
• enhance all forms of intelligence (including cognitive, emotional, social, intuitive and spiritual intelligences);
• train similar capacities to those that are developed by meditative practices, including accessing higher levels of consciousness (and maintaining these in the midst of ordinary life);
• use biofeedback to attain and maintain altered emotional states and modes of consciousness;

• have the same effects as various psychology therapies; and

• integrate and synergize conscious and unconscious motivations and cognitive processes.

This workshop is organized by Gino Yu, John Stewart, and Stephen Schafer.

For more information contact info@asiaconsciousness.org