The Malbody Centre will be presented as a multiparticipant environment that takes place in a speculative future setting, where wearables have become body protheses that mediate our senses, so-called e-bodilies. Protheses that are connected to networks controlled by large companies or states. The participant takes on the role of a malbody, a person with e-bodilies, who does not function according to the norm and must therefor be cast out of society.

This project is currently in development

Sketch for speculative protheses by Giulia Principe

The project takes a critical stance at 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?) and how our society deals with people who divert from the norm (diversity in terms of ability and body).

Credits

Collaborators: Tim Bosje, Tineke van Hilten, Giulia Principe and Marion Traenkle.

The project is supported by Baltan Laboratories as part of their Hack the Body research trajectory.


Original inspiration for this project came from an intensive workshop (or pressure cooker) that I curated as part of the metabody project at STEIM in October 2014.

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

Participants in this pressure cooker were: Ricardo de Oliveira Nascimento, Adriaan Wormgoor, Anja Hertenberger, Eric Magnée, Marloeke van der Vlugt, Miri Lee, Jonathan Reus, Marc Nukoop, Nicolo Merendino, Wendy van Wynsberghe, Michele Danjoux, Vanessa Michielon and Marije Baalman.