Immersion, interaction & participation in art & technology

A project that I will be developing over the next year.

Starting from a concept that came up at:

Steim E-Textile Project - short from STEIM Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Speculative fiction where wearables have been developed further to e-bodilies and the Quantified Self movement has been institutionalized to a Quantified Citizen Network. What happens to those that diverge from the norm - the malbodies?

A multi-participant environment for participants to become a part of and take the role of one of the malbodies.

Speculative protheses that

• mediate the senses
• change or enhance other body functions
• mediate interactions between participants

Challenges:

• balancing narrative elements and perceptual/sensual experiences
• non-verbal interactions
• interaction between participant and technology and interaction between participants
• non-competitive, immersive game: draw inspiration from larp

Components:

• scenography with sound, light, props
• costumes with sensing and actuation

The project takes a critical stance on

• body based sensing (the body as the last frontier between privacy and big data),
• the control of artificial intelligence over our experience of the world (what if not only our news sources are controlled by this, but also our bodily experiences?)
• how our society deals with people who divert from the norm (diversity in terms of ability and body).