The Malbody Centre
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.
related events
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Creating Algorithmic Sentience
In the second part of my “Sentient Machines” residency at Baltan Laboratories, I focused on prototyping the game interactions for the multiparticipant environment. During the residency I worked with Tim Bosje and Marion Traenkle.
We did a playtest on June 6 with 7 participants. As we had to put out the call for the playtest long before we created the larp/game, I gave the name Algorithmic Sentience to the larp in reference to the name of the residency program at Baltan: Sentient Machines, and highlighting the focus for the game: exploring both how algorithms change our ‘sentience’ as well as posing the question whether there is a ‘sentience’ of the algorithms.
In this report, I reflect on the design process, the playtest and the feedback, and what we want to change before the next playtest.
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More images from Baltan
Some more pictures from the residency at Baltan Laboratories of the work in progress.
The workdesk at Baltan (photos by Tineke van Hilten)
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Building prototypes at Baltan
In the first part of my “Sentient Machines” residency at Baltan Laboratories, I focused on building first versions of the different protheses prototypes to use in the Malbody Centre project. During this residency Tineke van Hilten joined me to help out with creating a wearable.
In this report, I address the various things that I worked on by theme, rather than in chronological order.
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