X-rays from a cyborg future

Here is a little clip, created by Danny Warner, that might bring to your awareness that the merging of our biological body and technological environment is in the end going to be a glorious process. So have a moment of rest and relaxation, click that triangle, and always, always watch fullscreen.

computer tumor

Japanese artist Mio I-Zawa has created this informative tumor to represent the CPU load of the computer one is interacting with, to give rise to a visceral embodied connection between human and machine.

pedaling together with your petbot

How obsolete do we actually want our bodies to become?

Will our morphology remain only to be a symbol?

It looks cute though, riding a tandem bike with your home robot. But this tempting cuteness is a simplificating slippery slope!

flowtime and the augmented yogi

Ralph Zoontjens, the author of this blog and master student at the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology, has recently graduated with his project "Flowtime: wearable biofeedback for synchronizing body and breath during yoga practice". (Yes I am writing about myself here)

Zoontjens has developed an interactive jacket that guides people with practicing yoga postures at home. The jacket contains soft sensors and a belt with vibration motors on the back. A device worn on the front of the belt connects to software with a virtual yoga trainer that encourages the practitioner to align breath and movement. The vibrations help this guidance by following a wave-like pattern. This way, technology becomes a peripheral signal that recedes into the background of awareness, and helps people become one with their body and mind.

This project is a step to his future vision of the 'cosmic cyborg'; a mode of being where, through progressively skilled interaction engaging the body and mind as fully combined, human and technology become one. This way, we regain an embodied intuition in our new biotechnological lifeworlds, so we gradually step away from detached, disembodied and rational thinking, but become intrinsically reunited with our world again.

The more concrete vision is to bring people an awareness of their own biologically given body and mind through yoga practice, so they can liberate themselves from socio-cultural enframings and redefine themselves ontologically with what is here, in the present moment. By developing technology for yoga practice and positioning it as an exergame, Zoontjens hopes to make yoga more accessible and relieve it from culturally distancing connotations like those of esoteric philosophy, spirituality and meditation, while staying true to the original teachings.

Of course Flowtime is a first step, and to become viable as a marketable product many steps of integration need to be done, especially concerning the blending of textiles and electronics. The design will be refined in the coming weeks,  and I will give you an update here on this blog when the time comes. Also, upcoming is a video that explains the Flowtime system in use and shows how it is linked to yoga practice, and the audiovisual software environment.

Further, I'd like to invite you to all come, see,  and try out the Flowtime system at the upcoming 'Stiltefestival' ("festival of silence"), on September 15th, 2009 from noon till 6PM at Eindhoven University of Technology.

More information: www.stiltefestival.nl

See you there!

a sensitive pan

This pan feels so alive that you'd almost feel sorry for putting it on a fire.

I love this direction for product design; showing how with simple technological augmentations an entirely new interaction can be elicited. In our capitalism-imbued machine-like technological lifeworld where emotion and deeper meaning in the products around us is abstracted to not much more than a surface coating, products that continuously, sensitively and meaningfully respond to their environment can make us feel much more connected, more at one with our world. This is not just adding emotion to an otherwise boring, functional product. Of course this physical response of the pan can induce an immediate emotion in interaction by viscerally showing a person how to handle the product. But this responsiveness of otherwise experientially dead products is changing our entire ontological relationship with the product too. If we see that what we create changes beyond our control, and that this can be beneficial to us if we just learn to flow with it, we might also ourselves see that we are continuously in a state of flux, part of our environment, one with it if we only choose to and see that it is much more fulfilling than condensing ourselves in something static that we attach to. As the old Buddhists and Heraclitus already knew, everything is constantly in a state of flux. Well that might or might not be so depending on one's frame of mind, it's in my opinion clearly a more beautiful and ultimately more fulfilling idea to design products for.

the frustrated beasts of today

Now what are the real animals of today? This interesting ad for a campaign by Rainforest Foundation Oro Verde is striking in showing how biology is changing nowadays.

Suddenly you start viewing these technological monsters in a human way, portraying destructive behaviour because of an inner frustration for not having a nice, natural environment of their own. Every time we anthropo- or zoomorphize objects (including perceptual patterns we classify as people and animals themselves!), it's nothing but a projection anyway, rendering this view of technology quite legitimate I think. The machines could also be seen as a delusional, delirious form of predators, trying to eat everything without finding anything they can digest.

And yes, that six-legged insectoid crane exists. It's developed by John Deere. The future of mobility technology will probably move more and more towards walkers to get us out of our rigid, linear, gridlike infrastructure.

Virtual sanddunes

Definitely a nice project is 'Reizend Zand', Dutch for 'travelling sand', an animation of sanddunes located in front of the railway station in the Dutch city Apeldoorn. Artist Giny Vos worked for four years on this project, in collaboration with the city of Apeldoorn, Rena electronics and a 3D animator, to finally deliver this 480.000 Euro display that contains 1.3 million LEDs.

Though perhaps not very interesting technology- or interaction-wise, this project in a way shows excellently what the aesthetics of future technology as I envision it look like. Organic, and ever adapting. Although it is a pity that it is still a direct translation of nature as we know it, and that it is not interactive. I hope there will be continuations of this project, and the display becomes a platform for interactive experimentation. This landscape could for example react on human passers-by and reflect their behaviour or their emotional states, hence becoming an intuitive tool for collective self-reflection and identity and self-concept building.

And the less serious science-fiction buff in me would propose an Easter egg for this system based on the classic 1984 David Lynch movie Dune based on Frank Herbert's novel: there could be a giant worm underneath the sand which rises up when the pedestrians or cyclists move in a certain way, or in certain configurations, of course accompanied by music including the lyrics "walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm."





But seriously, despite my usual critical stance I do find this stunning. Calm technology like this is definitely what we information-addicts need to feel more in tune.