Archive by Author
see yourself sensing
Black Dog sent me Madeline Schwartzman’s new See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception: Lots of great projects in here—many I’ve not seen before. Plenty of both high- and low-tech projects and with a sense of history and breadth. And the critical analysis is also well done—she groups these projects together to show their raucous investigative [...]
read moreunknown armature: body socks
For a couple of months now, I’ve been researching and testing some body sock prototypes, as part of a series of prosthetic research initiatives I’ve been calling Unknown Armature. I’ve mentioned body socks before; they’re wearable therapeutic tools for people with sensory processing disorders. You can’t find sensory processing challenges in formal diagnostic catalogs like [...]
read morebecause someone’s always said it both earlier and better
I am not a cyborg simply because I wear an artificial limb. I see cyborg more as a subject position than an identity, and believe it is more descriptive of my position vis-à-vis the relationships of production, delivery, and use surrounding my prosthesis than my actual interface with it. In other words, if I am [...]
read moreorgans everywhere, and more news
My semester at Harvard GSD is winding down; I’ll be sharing some new work in the coming break. In January I’ll be taking a course at the Adaptive Design Association in New York and interning with Artists in Context here in Cambridge. And I’m looking forward to a residency at UC Irvine next June, part [...]
read morechristine sun kim is unlearning sound etiquette
Filmmaker Todd Selby profiles Christine Sun Kim‘s performance work. From the description on the Nowness site: Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and [...]
read morethe importance of being a cyborg ableist
This article in H+ emphasizes the importance of embracing technology to further the cause of women’s equality in contemporary society. This is the kind of essay where you could almost swap out the feminist terminology for that of disability rights, with very few changes. Kyle Munkittrick lays out nicely the stakes for the cyber-feminist in [...]
read moreEDGE lab
The Experimental Design and Gaming Environments lab, or EDGE lab, at Ryerson University, works—among other things—on adaptive tech for children with disabilities. Like the High-Low Tech media lab group where I’m taking a course now, EDGE researchers are committed to democratizing materials for maximum customization and replicability. Following the example of the Adaptive Design Association [...]
read more“curiosity is a vice”
“…that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to break up our familiarities and [...]
read morematerial interfaces, part ii
First, just quickly: I’m quoted in Monday’s Boston Globe article about the Awesome Foundation. I’ve sung their praises here before, of course. And I’m now through the first section of work in my course on Crafting Material Interfaces at the MIT Media Lab. (Here’s the first post about this class.) We’re documenting our work all [...]
read moreradicalism and “miniaturized music”
“We do not return to individualized or privatized emotions when we use the Walkman: rather the Walkman’s artificiality makes us aware of the impending presence of the collective, which summons us with the infallibility of the sleepwalker. What the Walkman provides is the possibility of a barrier, a blockage between ‘me’ and the world, so [...]
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