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 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.

Transformer shoes

I just love transformable objects like these Nike shoes/toys. Our world is so static, cold and distant to us that people are still the most interesting things out there. I would like objects to start pulling tricks on us. To show us who we are, to mock us, to surprise and enlighten us. But most of all, to inspire us.

It is...a post-human skin disease?

If these things would pop out of my body overnight, and I could use them as a huge exo-lung, I wouldn't even mind. I could blow myself to work.

And there's the next obvious idea: a wearable helium balloon flying costume. Could be used in a goodbye ceremony for ex-presidents, too.

But seriously, this is the latest creation of Lucy and Bart, called 'Dripping Color'.

Human exoskeleton

If you combine my recent post about the T-1000 and the previous one about resolving the mechanic-organic dichotomy, you get this.

It is a robotic exoskeleton for humans, meant for lifting heavier weights, so you do not have to go to the gym anymore. It has a variable ratio with which it amplifies your muscle power and is connected to the skin, from which it detects the faint synaptic impulses from the brain.

How literally can you empower people?
How lazy can we get?
How evolutionary inferior can technology make you feel?
How is this not the first step in becoming fully hybrid?
How can this never be made in another country than Japan?

A few nice trivia are that this device is actually called HAL (while it is actually the opposite: physical, non-intelligent, unobtrusive). But the best, or the scariest, is that it is developed by a company called Cyberdyne. Yes, the same company that invented the Terminator! I'm getting paranoid.