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 servers 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 comforts with warm, soothing weight while tethering a patient to an electrical outlet.
