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 energy, rather than a technophile’s future shock:

Projects in this book have also served as examples for theoretical books about embodiment and the current relevance of the human body, with such themes as cyborgian society; posthumanism; cyberspace and social theory; and telepresence and communication theory. Seen in isolation the projects are iconoclastic, utopian, sometimes bizarre or disturbing. Seen together they present a unified look at design for the body—at the complexities of accommodating mobility and sensation simultaneously, at the strategies for augmenting, rewiring, or abrogating the senses, and at the state of the art of the human apparatus. Each project is, in its right, a speculation. Each one is visionary.

I’ll include images and discussion of the text over several posts, but to start—since I’ve been thinking so much about wearable constraint and liberation—I’ll include some of Cocky Eek’s wearable projects:

“Whether engaging wind, knotting space, morphing the body through pneumatic appendages, or getting lost in the interstice between materials, Eek’s work strives for endlessness…

Her forms wrap and convolute, consume and liberate, become taut and then flaccid through time, wind variation, and the composition of their fabric ‘skins.’”

And here’s Sitraka Rakotoniaina and Harry Vermeulen’s Time Conditioning prosthetic—a device that temporarily slows your motions to enhance your experience upon taking it off:

“Not every prosthetic device is designed to increase efficiency and improve ability at the outset. Time Conditioning seems at first to be thwarting efficiency. It s a low-tech hydraulic system for the arm that is engineered to slow down arm movement…[forcing] the arm to move as though it were under water.

The idea is to condition the brain. Once adapted to the new speed, the brain perceives the slowed down pace as normative. When the device is removed, perception is heightened. The body reflexes seem amped up while the muscle neurons retain a slow motion memory.”

HYPER-NORMAL from Sitraka Rakotoniaina on Vimeo.

image: Design Faction

More in See Yourself Sensing.

And these are disorders, plural. They don’t look the same on everyone. A person can be hypersensitive to stimuli—perceiving ordinary noises as shrill or piercing, or ordinary touches as aggressive attacks. Or she can be hyposensitive—under-aware of sensations like cold, or indifferent to physical pain. The sock is a kind of envelope over the wearer’s experience: She can see through the stretchy fabric, but she can’t be seen, and she can be enclosed while also exploring the world. The sock invites the wearer to push hard against its strong lycra, engaging its powerful resistance as an exercise, or a dance, or to engage an enemy proxy. It provides strong feedback and invisibility, an interior/exterior mediator for animated action.

These prosthetics are in fairly common use, especially for young people with autism spectrum conditions, and if you try one on, it’s pretty compelling. So I first re-positioned a body sock I ordered from this seller, making it a public prosthetic for people with or without the formal conditions that call for it.

Some colleagues and I tried it on as an experiment, trying to understand it as a sensorium and also as a kind of ad hoc performance piece. We invited others to try the experience and create some conversation around it.

People were drawn to it, and intuited immediately the possibilities for stretch and movement.

In some cases, I spoke to people about the purpose behind its original design—that’s me on the far right below. And in other cases, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what to make of the tendency for it to become a wearable for improvised dance or theater. Was I hoping to be an educator? Was it more interesting to document the wearer’s experience, or to witness the wearer as a persona on the street? Was it enough to blur the lines between who wears this in an organized, therapeutic way, and who might need one intermittently, or suddenly in a public place? I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still uncertain.

I then started thinking about making customized body socks—tweaking the original bright lycra and thinking about context-specific socks. Ones you could use to amplify your wishes in relation to your surroundings, play with interiority and exteriority.

And this last one I think of as a sketch—a tight enclosure with an opening for communication, should the wearer want it.

More on this to come.

Steven L. Kurzman, “Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright.” Cultural Anthropology, 16: 3 (August 2001), 382.

image: bisenscene

The new issue of Organs Everywhere is out, and I have a piece in it—it’s built from ideas I started working on with the prosthetics porn series some months ago. There are also great contributions from Liam Young, Tim Maly, the editor Simone Ferracina himself, and more. Images here are from his Digital Surgeon project; the excerpt is from my essay, “Toward An Ethics of Estrangement,” which includes work by Ekso Bionics, Klara Jirkova, Takehito Etani, Superflux, and the GAIA collective.

There’s a trump card in all conversations about cyborgs that goes like this: You find yourself equally fascinated and troubled by the latest prospects for distributing your intelligence among ever-more-refined machines. You remark that you can no longer tell the difference between your hand and your phone, and you mumble some words about “authenticity” and “mediated emotions” and vaguely wonder aloud about what human and humane experiences you’re losing.

But your conversation partner with that trump card will tell you what Donna Haraway told us so long ago: We have always been cyborgs, and the distinction between the natural and artificial is so blurred throughout history as to be meaningless—and drawing the distinction tends to be an instrument of domination anyway. Ever since we picked up sticks to aid us in catching food or otherwise manipulating our environments, we have been seamlessly extended by our tools. And this is ultimately a good thing.

Further, your conversation partner may announce that you are likely blinkered by the present moment, overvaluing the drama of the changes we are witnessing: All our current hype and fear about our relationships to technology mirror the scale and tone of the rhetoric that accompanied, say, the advent of cars, or telephones, or some other historical change.

But this line of thinking is most often a conversation stopper, isn’t it? I think even a purist would agree that there are network-enhanced, extensive tools we are using now that outpace even a provisional, context-specific ethics or grounded understanding about how to use them and about their ripple effects. The stakes at hand include human agency and passivity… [more in Organs Everywhere].

…I want to see more critical devices and designs that leave open questions about the liberations and limitations of our extended machine-body-selves, that indicate still-invisible conditions of ability and disability, dependence and strength, that disrupt our easy notions of technical efficiency and utility. I’d like to see more of what you might call tools for estrangement.

[more in Organs Everywhere].

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 vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.”

Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim on Nowness.com.

Thanks, Hans.

Transhumanists point to the pinnacle of what it believes humanity could become; where it might be going, and asks, “why not?” and “how do we get there?” Cyberfeminists (and postmodernists in general) look at the abject, the debased, the grotesque and the marginalized and ask “why is it so? How did this become the fringe?” Transhumanism needs cyberfeminism because it functions to expose the way in which defining the “human,” and in turn, the “transhuman,” can repress, reject, and otherize those it claims to help.

And:

Cyberfeminism takes as an axiomatic principle that, though technology is inherently neutral, the entire process of technological development, design, and engineering is influenced by society and culture and, thus, in part by normative forces such as patriarchy. While eco-feminists propose to fight fire with water, countering tech with nature, cyberfeminists champion fighting fire with fire. Feminism — and critical theory in general — provide tools and concepts necessary for transhumanists to understand how “the human” is socially constructed. “What makes us human” is constantly up for debate because the meaning of “human” changes through history and from culture to culture.

Right. If the temptation among feminists is to counter tech with nature, the temptation among those advocating for the disabled is to sentimentalize the experience of disability, positing a beneficial “lessons to learn” meaning to that life, as though disability as such, absent technology, is a necessary counterpart to the experience of abled-ness, whatever that is. Or the response is merely to ask for more assistive aids, without giving much thought to the designed identity-registers of those technologies. Without asking how those technologies may or may not reproduce the marginalization of people with disabilities. Finally:

The issue is one of the chicken-and-the-egg: does technology liberate society from norms or does political social theory liberate technology from norms? This question is, perhaps, the core issue of cyberfeminism. Judy Wajcman… [e]xplicates the debate¹ and concludes that while the rise of cyberfeminism has given people the tools and understanding to better utilize technology for feminist goals, technology currently does more to reinforce gender roles than to undermine them. If we extend this conclusion from just gender to all societal norms, we are confronted [with] a picture in which technological advancement without accompanying social movements becomes a source of danger and repression instead of hope and liberation. Cyberfeminism matters for transhumanism because we cannot overcome the limits of biology without overcoming the limits of society: the latter will always inhibit the former, not the other way around.

Note 1. Munkittrick is citing Wajcman’s “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies: In What State is The Art?” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 30, No. 3, June 2000

From low-cost wearable garments for speech-impaired children—featuring squeezable buttons that talk—to discreet chair-top self-rocking devices for kids with autism, Nolan and company hope to see their low-cost, DIY designs spread.

“We hope everyone keeps sharing these ideas and continues to improve them with their own innovations,” says Kenneally. “It’s an exciting experiment in democracy!”

A customized chair for Zoe, who can use it to sit upright without adult or medical assistance.

Soft buttons that squeak when squeezed; a possible first iteration for wearable communication.

A customized cardboard alphabet.

Here’s the entire Torontoist article.

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent “bad” information from invading and suffocating the “good.” Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.

[I hate to be so grad-school-y, but it's] Foucault in an interview, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984. S. Lotringer, Ed. Semiotexte, 1989.

[thumbnail photo credit]

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 through; you can click through from the home page of the class web site to “all postings” and see the notes and images from various experiments and fact-finding there.

We looked at conductors in this first section—and we were all assigned various groups of conductive materials that expand far beyond the traditional metals and such. Instead, we looked at conductive polymers, inks, adhesives, and nanotubes(!). My group looked at conductive elastomers—basically stretchy rubbers and rubber/plastic-like substances. Like other polymers, elastomers are usually used for the insulating properties, so making them conductive means some fancy work to reconfigure their basic properties. The result, though, is that you get conductive materials that can essentially be molded and extruded to almost any imaginable shape (shapes that can be pricey or limited with metals).

The best part of this research is digging into materials research, understanding intrinsic properties, and then—best of all—getting familiar with the advanced and weird and stunning range of materials out there, and their applications. (See conductive foam, metal rubber, stretch-sensing rubber, and this electronic skin, a project out of Stanford:

The foundation for the artificial skin is a flexible organic transistor made with flexible polymers and carbon-based materials that can be stretched up to almost one-third of its size without compromising any of the mechanisms or losing power. The cells maintain a wavy microstructure that extends like an accordion when stretched, and a liquid metal electrode conforms to the surface of the device in both its relaxed and stretched states. (via Inhabitat, see link below)

And the skin is super sensitive—it registers the brush of a butterfly, seen in this video:

To finish our experimenting with conductors, we each had to work with a material, or create an entire design using nontraditional conductive parts along the way. I felted some knitted wool with silver thread sewn throughout. Here’s before felting:

And here’s after:

The thread was a little worse for the wear, but the conductivity suffered only slightly. There are about a million kinds of electronic wearables you could make out of this kind of thing at Kobakant and Instructables.

[image credit]

Rey Chow in “Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution,” from Doing Cultural Studies, cited in Don Mitchell’s Cultural Geography