see yourself sensing
by Sara Hendren on 19/01/12 at 3:32 pm
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 [...]
life in the edited city
About a year ago, after this early post where I started comparing and collecting old-and-new images indicating wheelchair accessibility, my collaborator Brian Glenney suggested we create something like a stencil to alter existing signs—something that would involve spray paint, since he’s done a lot of graffiti. After a number of conversations, we created this first [...]
read moresticker’s here! (part of the signage: wheelchair project)
Who wants some stickers? These are 5.5″ squares, with a clear background. If you can document at least one, somewhere, I’ll send you a package.
read morethe terrorism of little changes
Scientific American recently blogged an account of Hugh Herr’s talk at Idea Festival. Herr, himself a double amputee, is among the most optimistic about the promise of the dramatic and sophisticated prosthetic limbs now available: To help himself and others who suffer from the loss of biological limbs, Herr created a discipline he calls “biomechatronics,” [...]
read more(so let’s keep talking)
“…[w]e know all we need to know when we have acquainted ourselves with a few simple formulae. We have been optimized by competition and environment, we are shaped by economic forces and means of production, we are inheritors of a primal guilt, we are molded by experiences of frustration and reinforcement. These are all assertions [...]
read morean “ethics of homelessness” (and a Der Spiegel publicity stunt)
If you don’t know Cabinet magazine, I humbly suggest that you rectify that fact. It’s a weird and wonderful mix of art, science, history, and mischief—and, naturally, hard to describe. Editor Sina Najafi does a great job, though, in his essay for the collection What Is Research in the Visual Arts? “In Cabinet, an academic [...]
read moreit’s a sign (part of the signage: wheelchair project, ongoing)
Second iteration of the accessible-access re-design coming very soon. I found this image last night at Boston Architectural College (otherwise a fine institution)—!
read morethe adjacent possible
From the NewScientist’s Culture Lab blog: “Exaptation is one of seven patterns or hallmarks of innovation that [Steven Johnson identifies in Where Good Ideas Come From], and you’ll find them, he argues, whether you are looking at self-organizing phenomena, the emergence of species or human ideas. They include serendipity, error and the ‘adjacent possible,’ a [...]
read moreAlien Staff: it’s virtual, it’s prosthetic
Jim Rossignol’s piece for Tim Maly’s recent project, 50 Posts about Cyborgs, includes this quote from Steven Shaviro’s 2003 work, Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society: “I extend the power of my hand or my mouth or my brain only at the price of excising the original organ—whether literally or [...]
read moreMedi-Speak
I’ve been thinking about a set of alternative hospital linens, and I’ve started with these pillowcases: It seems like there’s a lot of news lately about medical education and practice vis-a-vis the patient experience. And I thought I’d have a bit of fun with those mouthful-size words that tend to dominate hospital culture. Next: A [...]
read moreBut he does like Robo-Cop
From Jonah Campbell’s guest post about why the Terminator isn’t a cyborg, at Quiet Babylon: Part of why I think cyborgs are interesting, why they are interesting to us, culturally, is how they play on our anxieties about the human, and about the unity/disruption of the human body. The biggest question on the mind of [...]
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 [read more]
EDGE 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]
AGNES: the age suit
The Age Lab, at MIT. Thanks, Tim.
antonio rezza
Just discovered Rezza. Can’t get this image out of my head.
urban immune system research
Over at We Make Money Not Art, there’s a long and substantial interview with the Institute for Boundary Interactions and their various prototypes for a large and ongoing project, Urban Immune System Research:
The Urban Immune System Research [UISR] project was the culmination of a two day event we ran in December 2010 as part of [read more]
mark shepard’s CCD-me-not
This isn’t the first adaptive umbrella I’ve written about, but it’s certainly as timely, and there’s now a prototype in development. Mark Shepard is creating a Sentient City Survival Kit, “set of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city”:
As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces [read more]
deus ex: the eyeborg documentarian
Remember this guy? I mentioned Rob Spence in this post a while back; he’s now working on several film projects around his own and others’ prosthetic gear. Lots to think about here, in the ways he frames the possibilities and discussion.
Thanks, Andrew.
michael kontopoulos’s “water rites”
I had an exchange with Michael Kontopoulos about “Water Rites,” a design fiction where literal and cultural relationships with water are “far less cavalier.” Kontopoulos was intrigued by science fiction narratives like that of Richard Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land; in that story, an arid planet creates social rituals around water—the resource becomes precious, [read more]
sascha nordmeyer’s “communication prosthesis,” and more at MOMA
Sascha Nordmeyer‘s prosthetic “smile simulator” tool will be part of MOMA’s Talk to Me, a show that opens today. Looks great—and there’s a blog where the curators have also cataloged their process of finding work to include. A whole database of interesting projects there, both under the checked tab and in the queue.
“Talk to [read more]
talk-o-meter: so many, many uses
The Talk-O-Meter has made the tech rounds already, but I had to post it here. It’s so simple, and so good.
This phone app efficiently memorizes the speech patterns of two people at a table. It then can calculate how much each person is talking—giving “gentle bio-feedback” when one party or the other is dominating conversation.
So [read more]
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