thomas jenkins | portfolio

emotional prostheses

2008

Emotional prostheses, my thesis work at ITP, are devices built to mediate and support the idea of a modern human partially constructed by technological objects. Many of our devices serve as prosthetic augmentation in ways we don't necessarily think about: cellular phones become augmented organs of communication, laptops become repositories of personal memory, and online social networks like flickr, facebook, and myspace serve as aspects of our identity, incarnated as distributed pieces of the body on severs around the globe.

While offering an implicit criticism of the resituating of the body to unexamined, electronic spaces, the emotional prostheses are objects that reinforce and underscore the body's materiality. An anxiety prosthesis is an indicator of emotional mood, an alienation prosthesis serves to ground wild speculation in physical reality, and an insecurity prosthesis both comforts and tethers.

project website
process blog

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This Place is Not a Place of Honor

With Gian Pablo Villamil

2007

The Yucca Mountain Waste Isolation Project Plant is built to withstand and secure radioctive waste for ten thousand years, long enough for its toxicity to degrade to safe levels. Design documentation for the project consider how to develop marker systems to denote the place's danger even after any potential end to civilization. With so much on the line, what if the message degraded or the system failed?

The installation consists of 4 translucent screens, inspired by a proposed floor plan for the WIPP, irregularly torn and ripped, with video projections screened simultaneously from each side. From the front, the projection is a selection of material from the WIPP design specification, including proposed solutions from the design team. From the back, the projection is of amorphous, Cerenkov blue clouds and atomic cloud chamber experiments. Over the 5 minute course of the the video loops, the background loop becomes brighter and brighter, penetrating the holes in the screens and eventually overwhelming the data projection.

see the movie

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Compeditation

With Piama Habibullah and Matt Fargo

2006

Compeditation, attached stools with a table for resting the users' right hands, is a system that takes an action that many people pursue for personal and spiritual reasons and recasts it as something wholly different. By using biometric sensors (galvanic skin response, pulse rate monitors, and thermistors) that are more usually a part of lie detectors or medical equipment, the effect of meditation on the body is considered in a vacuum.

Meditation is not usually thought of as something competitive, but rather as something that is done for its own sake. Compeditation takes meditation and strips it down to biological indicators, controlling a game. The winner is the compeditor who remains the calmest. Reframing serene meditation as a high-pressure competition brings issues of emotional control to the forefront.

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Dead Wringer

With Andy Doro, Sonia Nelson, and Filepe Ribeiro

2006

The Dead Wringer is a stuffed animal that a user symbolically “murders” to deal with rage, anger, or severe frustration. The device tries to walk the line between creepy and cathartic, in order to provoke the user into reflecting on the nature of their rage and their emotion. Ideally, the user should find that the interaction itself is intrinsically fun and rewarding, as well as finding themselves deeply disturbed that they think so. Inside of the stuffed animal's neck is a custom built analog choke sensor that sends values to an arduino-based microcontroller platform.

By making something that is intentionally morally ambiguous, a space is opened for user interpretation. He or she is able to build personal experience into the device, as well as reflect on the nature of the experience and the emotion that inspired it. Hopefully, Dead Wringer will allow a relatively healthy outlet for rage and anger as well as offering a space to reflect on the nature of those emotions.

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Text Visualization

2008

A series of explorations into visualizing word-based statistical correlations between Democratic political candidates in the 2008 primaries. The goal is to produce screens that are painterly, while still letting particular relationships emerge.

Ongoing.

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Iconic

With Adam Parrish

2006

Comicas and sequential art have codified particular conventions into their storytelling technique. Rather than hoping to be representative of specific people and places, iconic structures, reductions in versimilitude to the everyday allow comics to be much more than what they actually depict.

Iconic is a comic strip with an infinite timeline and four levels of metaphoric structure. The comic reads right to left, but a viewer can chose to go from the highest level of representation to more abstract layers as they please. The lowest level of representation is a bare description of what is happening, while sketchier representations at other levels allow more and more interpretation on the part of the reader.

launch the applet

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