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 new designers of intelligent systems that change your world'

Let me promote the department I'm currently graduating from for a moment: Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology, where we're basically trying to combine everything into the development of new technologies, from anthropology to art, fashion, industrial design engineering, phenomenology, psychology, robotics and Zen meditation. In their multidisciplinedness these designers are truly the new Renaissance men, already living the next convergence. Know who they are and what they can do for you!

self-organized criticality in the brain

Beautiful visualizations of brain activity. A new metaphor for understanding how thought works is 'self-organized criticality'. It is not logical, not random, not based on deterministic chaos, but based on a critical state in between stability and turbulent instability that might be the optimum for information transmission within highly complex interlinked structures such as the brain. It also appears to allow the brain to adapt itself quickly to new situations, by rearranging which neurons synchronize to a particular frequency.

An analogy is made with a growing pile of sand; it keeps growing in a quite predictable fashion - this corresponds to the brain's resting state - , until the pile collapses and an avalanche of sand creates new piles, creating an increasingly complex structure over time.

This metaphor could also help to understand what the brain does in people with autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia and other ailments. To me, it would be interesting to create a map of what common stable states are in this self-organization process of the brain; a sequence that everybody's brain follows from foetus to possibly enlightened individual and what the neural correlates of these states are. I namely believe - and agree with Ronald Laing - that discovering/creating such a map could greatly help people with mental illnesses by guiding them on inner journeys, where they have to puzzle things out for themselves. Such a map could show people where the journey can lead to, what the path looks like, and how it can best be travelled.

display skin

Tokujin Yoshioka concepted this installation for Swarovski at their stand at Baselworld 2009, probably being very inspired by Daniel Rozin's work. I'd like to see this taken further and implemented as a self-actuating skin in consumer products, so skin can become display.

Test_Lab: V2 wearable technology performance art + lecture

As electronic technology is more and more pervading our everyday lives, it is also finding its way into our clothing. How will this fusion augment the human body and allow it a new means of expression, social interaction, or even personal and spiritual development?

Next Wednesday at the V2_ lab at the Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, an event called Test_Lab will take place comprising a lecture by Sabine Seymour, author of the book "Fashionable Technology", followed up by two live performances of groups that have developed interactive garments during a two-day workshop in collaboration with Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson of Kobakant and Plusea. As seen in the picture above, I will be performing myself as a 'Human Violin', rendering the technologically mediated human body both a generative and a manipulative instrument. Also other artists will show and discuss their latest projects. For anybody interested in one of the more exciting technological fusions of our day, or in the future of technology and the cyborg in general, make sure to be there!

It starts at Wednesday May 20th, 8PM, at the V2_ lab: Eendrachtsstraat 10 in Rotterdam.

the 21st century gait

One new morphological identity coming up, digitigrade legs sure why not! Two months waiting after your order at kimgrahamstudios.com, and you'll look like Pan himself. I wonder when the first person is actually going to decide growing his bones in such a radically different way.

the disabled hero

With products-to-be like Exmovere's Chariot, the disabled almost become the privileged. I find this product especially striking as an image, because it shows a full embodiment of a human and his technology, while still the connections between both the human body and the device as separate dynamic complex systems are still very abstract of course.

While it nears the proportions of a washing machine, you might call this product wearable although it definitely stretches the boundaries of that concept since if the Chariot is wearable, is a regular car or a Segway not wearable? The interesting aspect of this innovation still is mostly in the image, as with a car or Segway it is clear that people have to consciously move the technological device with their own bodily actions, while the Chariot seems to be blended together with the human body.

In this, it profoundly changes the body and while optimizing it for a specific function, namely that of perpetuating itself over flat surfaces, it makes the body less flexible and less holistic. In a sense, the Chariot reinforces the split between body and mind, which remarkably is also signified by the almost literal higher placement of the human on a pedestal, as if he has conquered nature and can now abstract himself from the earth that gave birth to him. Of course we grow through abstractions, and by now abstracting our entire being we can maybe come to make more transcendental realizations about the oneness of man and technology.

To me the Chariot is one of the clearest signifiers of posthuman technology with which our world will soon be pervaded: fully embodied, absorbing the human, abstracting it before being able to uplift it. A temporary cocoon towards the metamorphosis that posthuman enlightenment will be.