natural born cyborgs | notes

Intro to Chapter 3

• MIT—Sensetables, and interface that reacts to real world objects; Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs)—removing the space between input and storage (pen and paper, keyboard and hard drive)
• Yo-Yo Ma—using a bow interface to create new musical sounds on a cello; just another means to creating his art, it brings more life to creating digital music BECAUSE of the better interface than just some buttons
• “The goal of Augmented Reality is to add digital information to the everyday scene” – different than VR; merging on physical and informational realms; ie: seeing arrows in your vision to help you navigate
• Blurring of digital and physical—children’s game where real world actions affected digital actions and vice versa (mixed reality play)
• Tangible vs invisible—objects that are tangible become invisible because they are so innate and intertwined in everyday functions
• “The combination of dynamic appliances and transparent technologies is surely a match made in cyborg heaven”—design and redesign over time, adapting to culture and individuals; our brain is constantly learning and relearning, why shouldn’t our technology be doing the same (ie: speech to text learning a user) REPITITION REPITITION REPITITION
• “In all these cases (and you can probably now dream up many more), we discover that the body-image supported by a biological brain is quite plastic, and highly (and rapidly) responsive to coordinated signals from the environment”—optical illusions but cooler, “feeling” sensations from objects that are not a part of you!; our bodily perception is basically just a construct that we can mold
• We were made this was on purpose because our bodies do change over time; work with phantom limb patients and creating a VR experience helped them to relieve pain in these nonexistent limbs; perceived correlations—how we are able to trick out minds because if we see and feel something at the same time our mind attempts to connect them
• Body image can be changed to include nonbiological parts (like a cane or tennis racket…or new technology); ie: monkey began using a rake as if it was just an extension of its body

read & respond | Hertzian Tales Ch. 2

Becoming apart of an integrated circuit

Sociopolitical environments:

1. Capitalist democracy
2. Comunism

Subtle enslavement of human beings to their devices:

-dependency

-mental consumption

-lack of variability in design

Conceptual model of technology:

-increases efficiency

-supports workplace

-not human-centered

Transition from our design origins of electronic objects (the military)

DARPA-collegiate military funded research

Human factors

-Participation, competition

-Our behaviour is sculpted by the hegemony

Hegemony-dominant thought

-have to be apart of the hegemony to affect it

Zanuso and Sapper - 1969 - TV for Brion Vega ~ black, shiny cube; all the interface disappears into the cube; black monolith; object of art

Art movements happening at this time - minimalism, pop art, surrealism

The Atom

Very slick designs (ie: The Jetsons)

Semiotics, semantics

Fan Heater - 1981 - Scheuer - Fibonacci sequence

Metaphorical definitions:

Opaque: black, mystery box; undefinable

-no semiotics, instructions

-can’t operate the interface without noticing

-good for dangerous things, methodical

Transparency:

Biomorphism:

Biology is redundant - Stelarc

Satori TV

Adelbretch - globe shaped robot that follows you around

Pet or alien?

Reacted to touch with speech

User unfriendliness does not mean user hostility

Poetry

ICE - interrogation and customs enforcement

Interrogation robot

Look up: Psycho-Pass anime

Anthony Dunne

Critical or speculative design - theorycrafting, tries to project what will be designed years from now using a critical eye

Technological Dream Series No. 1: Robots

Intimate posture (like holding a baby) to use Sentinel

read & respond | Hertzian Tales: Ch. 1

When reading this article, my mind was immediately drawn to smartphones. There is so much technology in this small device and its casing is quite simple. Any changes to it are minute and the public has large reactions to even these. The smartphone has lost all art in my opinion--it is just meant to be aesthetically appealing--there is nothing that pushes boundaries. The device is just as the article says--a way to use and understand the "incomprehensible technologies" (20).

Smartphones are all in the same shape and very similar is style. They have essentially become icons because of how recognizable they are. The design choices, as I said before, are minimal and sleek. Which, works in our consumer market, but to take these devices to their full potential, should we experiment with more unique and interesting ideas? Can you image someone walking around with a circular smartphone? It would be weird, but it could catch on and become the new normal.

Radio in a Bag by Daniel Weil is a questioning of our modern packaging. We buy all of the electronics and use them everyday, but rarely do we know what is happening on the inside. Most of our phones are difficult to open, so we never see the inside. It's a curious thing that has been taken for granted because of its deep integration in our lives. Just taking this class is opening my eyes to how much of my world is run by technology and how everything is technology and art--at the same time.

I feel that at some point, the commercial industry stole technology from art. Devices were designed in a logical, efficient manner; not that this is bad or wrong, just it has become the precedence for all electronics. When, in actuality, this false divide between art and electronics needs to be taken down. Artists need to come in a start pushing boundaries and taking risks in product design. We shouldn't be playing it safe--we need to make movements and questioning and staying curious. Technology needs to come back into the art realm, and technological art needs to be created just for art's sake. On that same note, there does need to keep a balance of the functionality and art aestheticism, at least for consumer products.

If you look in the past at cameras, you see varying designs and unique choices. The product has functionality but also looked nice. You could differentiate one camera type from another. Now you can hardly tell the difference between an iPhone and Samsung Galaxy until you see the OS.

 
Overall, design is often looked over by consumers of technology, and designers keep it on the simple side. I think we need to expand more in dynamic design of our electronics.

read & respond | The Art of Noise

How music is evolving and created, related to technology and industrialization and civilization

Dadaism and futurism

Framed by discussing historical precedence

exploration of sound,

ancient form,

Mythologies,

natural,

Mathematical - theory to describe the natural world

-fibonacci sequence in nature (leaves, branches)

-fractals

-golden ratio 1:1.618 (faces, “squares”), pleasing to look at

Ratio - proportions (rationality) ---> laws

IDEALS - classical Grecian sculptures

Scales in music

Infinite combination of sounds (THINK: all the muscle movements in the face)

1913 Russolo - mechanisms are growing more popular (cars, manufacturing, mass crops, factorization) - Western Europe, USA

Scales are not necessarily relevant because they were questioning authority (ie: church)

If you have authority you are the author

Hegemony - accepted rules that run the world

Rationality

You can’t escape the reality/hegemony so you create an alternate reality around it

Ethos - ethics

Russolo is coming out of WWI (gassing of humans in trenches)

Social Contract

Embrace reality - throw away/ignore musical scales, authorship, narrow view music vs the openness of the world. Music became idealized -- lost its connection to natural sounds

“The world is your instrument”

read & respond | Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A Historical Perspective

Though not necessarily written about in this article, this topic definitely fights the line between scientific experimentation and artistic expression. While usually the science and art communities are believed to be very far apart, electricity's use in performance art is bringing these two circles together. In the beginning of this article, the process of scientists making electric discoveries is discussed. Once this groundwork is set, artists (who may have not even thought of themselves as artists in their time) come in and create modern spectacles.

In performances such as Stephen Gray's, science became entertainment, though mostly for the elite members of society. Blurring the lines and boxes we have created as a society, art, science, and entertainment are all intertwined. New scientific discoveries were exhibited in intriguing ways, in order to spread knowledge of complex ideas. While members of society in the 1700s were likely familiar with Art, science was probably a fuzzier area, and likely caused fear, especially with some of the dangerous effects of large amounts of electrical current. But, when scientists/artists displayed their discoveries in artistic ways, audience members were more likely to be intrigued.

But while there are interesting performances that came from the use of electrical current in humans, there is the darker side--electrical execution. Though definitely not art, during the course of discovering a new artistic medium, there was the discovery that electrical currents can kill humans. The fact that brilliant art performances have come from something so dangerous is amazing.

There is still the argument that electrical performance art, such as Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha's work, is not art. Because of the wall in our minds between science and art, it becomes difficult to classify what their work is. Even though they call it performance art, because it is artificially orchestrated, is it really art? It is not purposefully thought out to have a specific set of actions but is random. Is art required to a purpose? Just because their work does not exactly have a story line, it does have the purpose to explore facial expressions.

Also, there is the argument that it cannot be art simply because it uses technology. Technology is involved in all forms of traditional art, though. Oil paints have become perfected over time, the potter's wheel is electrical, and in modern times, digital artists use computer programs. All artistic mediums use technology, though maybe not technology as we typically think of it. Personally, I believe that their work is both art and science. Even though this goes against the desire for us to classify everything, sometimes we must accept that there are grey areas. Elsenaar and Scha simply go about their experiments in an artistic way.