Post written on 1/09/2014
In between our official scheduled meetings, Mike and I will be doing our research and keeping in touch online. After the first meeting he shared with me some existing examples of digital technology used for creative means, which I will share here:
Wearable digital instruments: Canadian researchers, Joseph Malloch and Ian Hattwick, designed prosthetic musical instruments, which included an external spine and a touch-sensitive rib cage, that create music in response to body gestures.
Mi.Mu Gloves: Electronic gloves that allows enabled wearers to interact with their computer remotely via hand gestures. Watch their video here.
INTIMACY 2.0 dress by Dutch designers Studio Roosegaarde and Anouk Wipprecht: A high-tech fashion project that creates clothing made from leather and electrically-sensitive foils that become opaque or transparent according to alterations in voltage, in other words, it becomes transparent depending on the wearer’s heartbeat.
Uji Wall Clock by Ivor Williams: The clock uses a wearable ECG sensor to record the electric activity of the heart. This information is sent wirelessly to the clock, which moves its hands backwards and forwards in time with the pulse. This project aims to raise questions about the way wearable devices are increasingly used to harvest “quantified self” data from individuals, where ethical issues of sharing and ownership of such data are still emerging. The “quantified self” is a movement that began in California in 2007 to incorporate technology to collect biometric data such as heart rate, blood oxygen level or tracking cortisol levels, with the goal of self-advancement. Instead of using the data in a quantifiable way, the Uji uses it in an abstract way. The clock hands move back and forth depending on the pulse of the wearer and don’t indicate no other information at all, such as whether the heartbeat is healthy or not.
I am quite inspired by these examples and am particularly drawn to the Uji clock that questions the uses of data collected from wearable devices. It made me ponder about the ownership of data, especially in situations when these data are on the internet. Do these data belong to the person monitored or the company/person who created the device? In the process of creating, such as drawing in my case, I wonder what data could be collected during that process and how could we use that data in an interesting way or whether we could put the data through some other processes, which could then affect the drawing process, like in some kind of loop.
