The Society of The Spectacle was exhibited at The Royal Interface Culture Masquerade Ball during the Ars Electronica Festival 2009 in Linz, Austria.

The egg did not hatch.

37ºC is a wearable body temperature display in the form of a broach that alerts you and the public to your body temperature – indicative of your health.

Our experiences in public spaces are becoming increasingly rich with data – abstractions of the virtual and real environments. The devices we carry on our body are super-connective to the internet, the environment and each other. They ship with multiple acute sensors and softwares. As a statement object, it embodies a sense of intensity associated with health that is performative in social and public environments throughout crowded modern cities.

It is immersed and fused with the flow of media and information also ubiquitous in cities.  Although, as it is a digital device, it affords a sense that it will change at any moment as the body shifts in a constant state of biological flux.

Project Questions:

•How will such a broach be perceived in public?

•How will the wearer feel when they wear it?

•Will people reflect further on information displayed in public spaces.

Our encounters with technology spark a diversity of human emotions. Continuously extending in parallel with technological development. Technology is more embedded, sensory and mobile, and as a result, so is the behavior of the objects that embrace it. What experiences do we expect from our encounters with our everyday objects? How would we like our robots to relate to us: subservient, intimate, dependent, equal? How will the behavior of objects change our relationship to them. How would you perceive two computers at leisure playing chess in a park speaking english to each other?

This project embraces several themes from AI and gaming, to a technological spectacle and autonomous verbal communication between otherwise computational devices. By staging two computers in a park playing chess we are also establishing them in a role of leisure; the computers are perceived as not performing a task for the user but more as performing a task for themselves.

This project is in collaboration with Onur Sönmez

The Mexican Standoff removes the physical link between the persons thoughts and actions; people are directly thinking about what they are doing – creating a hyperreality.

Two players stand facing each other in a long room wearing EEG headsets connected wirelessly to a computer. The first-person view of each player from Counter Strike is projected onto the opponents body; so each player is ‘clothed’ in their Counter Strike character. When the headsets detect via EEG analysis that the player is relaxed they will fire their weapon.

In popular culture, a Mexican Standoff is usually portrayed as two or more opponents with guns at the ready, creating a very tense situation. A Mexican standoff is a slang term defined as a stalemate or impasse, a confrontation that neither side can win.

This was developed with Onur Sönmez at MediaLab Prado, Madrid in January 2010

Newsleak is not an art project.

A Newsleak is a publication: a motivated functional hybrid of real and digital cultures and media. Press a button on a pink box in the urban environment to instantly receive a printed summary of the latest news from around the world, news from your current location, news of internet cultures, events, trends and social media.

Our aim is to cultivate a functional exchange between the real space and the virtual space. Think of a Newsleak as you would any other print media publication: it has a target audience, a distinct style and type of content, and specific intervals and methods of distribution. Most publications are fundamentally focused on the targetaudience and the target audience is defined by the content and distribution.

The next iteration of Newsleak will be more autonomous, aware and dynamic. Acutely sensing the environment surrounding it. Think of it like a black box flight recorder for gathering anonymous information in public space; comprehending the emotional and topical state of society surrounding it, and recontextualising it with greater cyberspace.

The Fraunhofer Institute’s non-invasive biometrics computer vision technology will detect the facial expressions of passers by – happy, sad, surprised or angry, along with their sex, quantifying the emotional state of the real space surrounding each Newsleak unit. Microphones connected to speech recognition software will recognise which words are being spoken, this data will then be processed by psycholinguistics algorithms developed at MIT and compiled into a tag cloud of words that are also trending online: seaming real and cyber discourse. It is important to note that all information gathered through computer vision and sound analysis techniques is processed in realtime and thus stores only data relevant to the project: for example, ‘a man was happy’, or ‘the word Facebook was spoken’. This way there is absolutely no chance of a person being traced back to a spoken word or biometric expression: privacy is not an issue. Equivalent analysis will be performed on information generated in cyberspace. The most recently updated profile pictures and images uploaded to the web will be analysed with the same biometrics software, along with a psycholinguistic analysis of the most recent news and social media content.

In summary, in this iteration of Newsleak each unit will be acutely aware of emotional states in real and cyber space. Combining this information with the already established Newsleak editorial summary of the latest news from around the world, news of their current location, news of internet cultures, events, trends and social media.

Who is our target audience? Our target audience ranges from those who seldom use the internet and are unaware of cultures or services of the internet. To those who are often connected to the internet and engage in social media of some kind. The target audience is a mirror of the content we provide and functions to overlap the borders of the real and virtual spaces. Think of how the content of a credible newspaper is structured – world, politics, business and sport.  Not every section will be relevant to every reader, but every reader accepts that every section is relevant to their broader environment and culture.  As our everyday begins to exist more in virtual spaces and information about how we behave and act in these spaces is made available the more we should reflect and report about it: the more, ‘we‘ should pertain to people from both spaces.

A Newsleak content structure -

Worldwide:

• Latest news worldwide – blogs & google news,
• Top Twitter Trends worldwide.

Local area:

• Biometric Emotional Analysis
• Psycholinguistic Real vs Cyber space Comparison
• Latest local Twitter posts,
• Latest local internet search trends,
• Current temperature, time and location,
• Latest music performances in area searched from MySpace.
• Latest local photos from Flickr

Internet Culture:

• Trending Google Searches,
  
• Most edited Wikipedia pages,
• Traffic load on the internet,
• Twitscoop tag cloud,
• Reddit article,
• Digg article,
• Tumblr images or text collage.

A wonderful venn diagram ‘mantra’ for Newsleak by Mahir M. Yavuz

Newsleak in the Kassa Gallery, Istanbul 2010.

Newsleak on the streets of Budapest 2010.

Invite strangers to listen along with your music or podcast on public transport with a playful brightly coloured, ear shaped additional headphone jack.

For The Curious Listener aims to break the environmental disconnectedness of headphones. Is simply the possibility of entering the aural-scape of another person enough to shift the inherent disconnection MP3 players exude? It is intended to invite strangers to enter into your private sound world: it is both an experience for you and the person listening to it. By using the form of an ear the user can be playful, leaving it in nooks and crevices that show no sign that they are the source of the audio. It is a playful exploration of the altered perception MP3 players afford. Furthermore it affords or fulfils a fantasy element whereby no longer do you look at a person wearing headphones and wonder, ‘What are they listening to?’ you can plug in and listen in.

Device Shifting – shift the behaviour of how a human relates to a device by either occupying it, lowering its level of required or possible engagement or transforming its input or output with a mass produceable accessory.

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This research takes a critical design approach as defined by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby{Anthony Dunne, 2005, Hertzian Tales – Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design} to explore our evolving interrelationships and interdependencies with devices. Critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life. Accepting that our interrelationships and interdependencies will only intensify as we become more connected to each other and to cyberspace through devices, we will require a more intimate and humanly experience of connection.

Device Shifting is applied critical design. By designing accessories it is possible to affect and engage with established interrelationships, interdependencies and behaviours with the devices. The four accessories documented in this thesis are as close as I could come to creating the appearance of mass produced accessories for mass produced products. Being not designed for a gallery, they are designed to be consumed in the same environments we purchase our devices. By achieving a high standard of production they engage with the rhetoric of consumption and can be effectively critical. The more believable they are as ‘real’ products the more functional they are as applied critical design.

Adhesive paper for the top of laptops. Paper Application explores our relationships with computers and distractions. It can only be used when your computer is switched off or sleeping. Paper is still an integral part of our everyday and the computer is as yet incapable of replicating it. Paper Application could be seen as an enhancement for a computer. Although simple, it an accessory that in a consumer context functions as applied critical design. It is satirical with plausible rhetoric.

Device Shifting is applied critical design. By designing accessories it is possible to affect and engage with established interrelationships, interdependencies and behaviours with the devices. The four accessories documented in this thesis are as close as I could come to creating the appearance of mass produced accessories for mass produced products. Being not designed for a gallery, they are designed to be consumed in the same environments we purchase our devices. By achieving a high standard of production they engage with the rhetoric of consumption and can be effectively critical. The more believable they are as ‘real’ products the more functional they are as applied critical design.

The Viewfinder & Screen Cap is an attachment that fits over the viewfinder and preview screen. It suggests that as digital photography is less costly and consequential you can ‘focus on the moment’ and trust that the automatic functions will work. As a result it also retains some of the surprise when you download your photos and leads people to use the automatic functions of their devices.  Moments are no longer seen and experienced through the body of a camera. Attach the viewfinder and screen cap for your particular brand of camera and set the camera to automatic.

Each model of camera has it’s own cap so as to integrate seamlessly into the design and further reinforce its perception as a mass produced accessory.

This is designed for the Canon G9.

Device Shifting - shift the behaviour of how a human relates to a device by either occupying it, lowering its level of possible engagement or transforming its input or output with a mass produceable accessory.

Device Shifting is applied critical design. By designing accessories it is possible to affect and engage with established interrelationships, interdependencies and behaviours with the devices. The four accessories documented in this thesis are as close as I could come to creating the appearance of mass produced accessories for mass produced products. Being not designed for a gallery, they are designed to be consumed in the same environments we purchase our devices. By achieving a high standard of production they engage with the rhetoric of consumption and can be effectively critical. The more believable they are as ‘real’ products the more functional they are as applied critical design.

The first Device Shifting accessory is the Faraday Handkerchief. Using the inherent faraday properties of conductive fabric it is able to block network signals to a mobile device. A faraday cage functions by creating a lattice that is smaller than the wavelength of frequencies it is intended to block, acting as a net that disperses and absorbs the signal.

]]> http://timdevine.net/faraday_handkerchief/feed/ 0 http://timdevine.net/thumb-fu/ http://timdevine.net/thumb-fu/#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:56:54 +0000 tim http://timdevine.net/?p=714