douglas irving repetto's 'foal'
by Sara Hendren on 20/04/12 at 3:57 pm
Douglas Irving Repetto’s “foal” project has been one of my favorites for years. Not sure why it took me so long to post it here. It’s a simple walking table—a piece of furniture that weirdly, animatedly, mimics the first tentative steps of a gangly animal. two_foals Repetto has taught people to make these creatures at [...]
Alien 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 moreiPad use footnote: adaptive passivity?
With Abler, I’m collecting prostheses and augmentive tools, but also the experiences created by the gadgetry. I especially love unexpected experiences that happen due to what appears to be a limitation, whether in the user or the tool itself, as I laid out in my post about the iPad’s accidentally adaptive interface. I’m pretty sanguine [...]
read moreBertolt Brecht, adaptive apps, and why the iPad isn't just for consuming content
Media theorists love Bertolt Brecht’s famous 1932 essay, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.” It’s a prescient call for participatory technology: “…radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. [...]
read more"I am, rather, an impresario of scientists."
Stefany Anne Goldberg examines Jacques Cousteau’s life of exploration and discovers a big dreamer. Cousteau was a storyteller, and only able to gather support for his projects as long as he was able to ignite the interest of collaborators. “I am not a scientist,” Cousteau told The Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “I am, rather, [...]
read morerebecca horn's 'finger gloves'
Rebecca Horn‘s Finger Gloves, from 1974. I’ve included a video of the gloves in action below; you only need to watch the beginning to get a sense for how they work. In Barcelona as a young artist in the early 1960s, Horn was working with glass fiber without a mask. Unaware of any harm, Horn [...]
read moreAdaptation, Part I: How the Eames chair came from leg splints, and why "disability studies" isn't just identity politics
In 1941, the husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, were commissioned by the US Navy to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more securely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, [...]
read morenot Luddite but ludic
Svetlana Boym’s Off-Modern Manifesto describes her interest in “broken-tech art”—and this is very much at the heart of my collaborative work on sensory substitution with Brian Glenney: “Technology, we are told, is wholly trustworthy, were it not for the human factor. We seem to have gone full circle: to be human means to err. Yet, [...]
read moreAdaptation, Part II: hearing aid jewelry, chairs that give hugs, and the art of changing the question.
In Part I of this series, I wrote about the still-new territory that is true adaptive design. As shown in the case of the Eames chairs, we’ve only begun to explore the aesthetic-and-engineering innovations that may shift our cultural ideas about ability and disability, independence and dependence, normalcy and variation. Let me point to some [...]
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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