I just got linked to this implementation of some of the ideas I’ve been kicking around. It’s nice to see other people thinking about this kind of personal emotional device, and the idea of a PWMing a LED is a nice way to represent diffused worry.

link: kombolói

“This is a quick, quick sketch for an idea I had for a intimate personable device that is best described as a digital worry bead or Kombolói — not so much a worry bead as something to capture and diffuse your anxiety. It works by capacitively linking your tension through a unique capacitive touch sensor and then harnessing that energy, turning it into light and then diffusing it into more soothing energy.”

DEAD WRINGER

I’ve been working on projects that explore physical spaces for technological interaction within emotional spaces. This was conceived of as a device to mediate negative emotions technologically. There exist many technologies for recreational, ludic or generally positive emotions, but few properly interactive objects for the overwhelmingly negative. 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, to provoke the user into reflecting into the nature of their rage and their emotion. Ideally, the user should find that the interaction is fun and rewarding, as well as deeply disturbing that they think so.

By building something that is intentionally ambiguous morally, it opens up a space for interpretation on the part of the user. They are able to build their own experience into the device, as well as reflect on the nature of the experience. Hopefully, Dead Wringer allows a relatively healthy outlet for rage and anger as well as offering a space to reflect on the nature of the emotion.

TONY DUNNE AND FIONA RABY–The Placebo Project

“The Placebo project is an experiment in taking conceptual design beyond the gallery into everyday life. We devised and made eight prototype objects to investigate peoples’ attitudes to and experiences of electromagnetic fields in the home, and placed them with volunteers. Made from MDF and usually one other specialist material, the objects are purposely diagrammatic and vaguely familiar. They are open-ended enough to prompt stories but not so open as to bewilder.”

KELLY DOBSON–ScreamBody(Wearable Body Organs)

“The wearable apparatuses function as transitional objects - they allow bridges between the person’s internal experience and the outside world insituations in which the person would otherwise not be able to make that possible. Each apparatus simultaneously acts to call attention to the social repression addressed by the very need for the existence of the device. Participants access sensorial energy that has been implicitly or explicitly put to sleep by enculturation.”

ANDREW SCHNEIDER–Experimental Devices for Performance”

“My multidisciplinary work attempts to critically investigate human and technological interdependence. I see this interdependence as both emotional and physical. We are all infinitely removed from everything, everyone, and more so, from ourselves. Our inners do not connect to our outers with any sort of transparency. Language separates us from the experience of the real. All of us is filtered. We are performing rather than living our lives everyday. We as humans seem to have countered this predicament with technology. I am interested in highlighting this concept through the magnification and extension of the themes of inability and dependence.

EXPERIMENTAL DEVICES for PERFORMANCE reifies this notion by placing technological media over the body, masking the layer that masks the layer that interprets our corporeal devices of communication (our senses). EDP is a suite of five wearable devices examining our state of communication. Small screens cover and confuse the “truths” of the mouth and the eyes. Sensor-embedded shoes map footfalls to soundtracks. A camera-coated hat only displays its cameras’ signals when the wearer’s head comes in contact with a television. A Polaroid picture is taken every time someone blinks. In order to control the media, a performer must also control his/her body in artificial ways. The performer controls the media controls the performer. ”

KATE HARTMAN–This Device is For You

“I am developing a new line of communication devices. These devices examine the way we relate to ourselves and to others. They are assistive, demonstrative, and potentially invasive, demanding both performance and play through the avenue of physical involvement. They are an attempt to simultaneously transgress personal, social, and geographic space. They are, in a sense, a form of social intervention.”

Definitions of “prosthetic” from dictionary.com, giving a nice socio-historical context to the term.

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object for social anxiety?

    shawl or scarf like silicone molded with resistors inside?

tighten it around yourself as a supporting act  and it becomes less conductive and more warm

     fleshy physicality, comforting/discomfiting weight

    suspension of conductive inside, making it variably conductive

        wire bits

        flakes

                this would be really tough to control

    stretch tighten –> more resistivity

        green lights to approach, tighten object, lights dim and turn off

        warming circuit and lighting circuit would need to be different (high voltage/current for warming?)

            power issues… high amperage batteries is a kind of losing game. LiPO?

2000mAh Molex Connector Polymer Lithium battery

            http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8486

          ($17, needs a particular charger)

            http://www.powerstream.com/LL.htm

($7.70 for samples, $2.57@100… part  # GM041842)

    material is explicitly bodily

    tightnening could make hackles rise? for user or audience?

    I need to draw this, play with form and layout

    prototype silicone molding, molding to make a variable resistor

           silicone molding procedure/info links

           http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rapidproto/manufacturing/molds/silicone.html

           http://www.artmolds.com/category60.cfm

           http://www.hirstarts.com/moldmake/moldmaking.html

            the Compleat Sculptor

                      90 Vandam Street

DESCRIPTION
In a world deeply mediated through technology, it becomes unclear whether existentialist anxiety and alienations are due to innate tendencies within or from environmental factors without. It could be argued that modern humans are already cyborgs, existing as a co-construction of the self and the technological, albeit in dimensions that have little to do with emotional content. Developing technology for a person as a holistic being is lagging behind commercial ventures. Should we begin to explore what it means to develop personal bodily technologies to contain our negative emotions, making wearable objects that become part of ourselves? That are necessary to feel like ourselves?

What will these objects look like?

Why?

RESEARCH

• Dunne and Raby Design Noir
• Dunne and Raby Hertzian Tales
• Dobson, Kelly “Wearable Body Organs”
• Hartman K. — Thesis
• Schneider A. — Thesis
• Haraway D. “Cyborg Manifesto”

PLAN
I want to make three or four devices that mediate and support particular emotional anxieties and alienations, that could be considered a representative suite of such objects.

I figure it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a list of the steps that are left to do in each object, as far as I can see from here. I plan to cross things off and date it when I get them done.

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