cousin girls

Next Monday, the Performance “Augmented Body and Virtual Body II - netBody” will take place at Acedemy of Media Arts Cologne.

Suguru Goto, from a technical, artistic, and philosophical perspective, investigates the body as a distributed phenomenon which involves questions about the other, identity, and postmodern culture. Deleuze and Guattari come to mind, but also topics as embodied, distributed cognition, action-perception loops, cyborg culture or posthumanism.

If you’ve been reading some Deleuze/Guattari, you might have met the idea of the Body without Organs, and also that of the Rhizome. In this context, it could be not too wrong to express the interest of Augmented Body and Virtual Body II - netBody like this:

A body cuts into the streams of de- and reterritorialisation. By this, it constitutes a block the specifity of which lies in that it is not only subject to an actualisation of the virtual in the process of de- and recodings, but also the subject of such an actualisation (the brain as a body, or as a special image under other images, as Bergson put it – my body is part of my brain). To me, identity seems to have a lot to do with a system experiencing that its parts makes a whole just in the sense that e.g. the hand you can observe do all these things for you simply does not leave you (this maybe is opposed to a constitution in the sense of mirror stage).

Thus, the body seems to be double: On the one hand, it constitutes a natural kind, a system demarkating itself in constantly performing a homeostasis. Mechanism connects here. On the other hand, there is meaning (maybe not signs in particular, but see the notion of the body as double in Sybille Krämer: Does the body disappear? In: Seifert, Kim, Moore (Eds.) Paradoxes of Interactivity, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008 (in print)). Social processes which actualise themselves in this peculiar domain are bound to ideological conceptions. By that, one can say that it is also ideas that cut into the streams, viz. in the order of language (which is the main topic of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense).

This is the field on which Augmented Body and Virtual Body II - netBody plays. You might have a body that is not completely yours. It functions in the context of nature as well as culture. E.g., bodies are defined by natural neccessity and possibility, as well as by social images of the order of representation, but also here there is possibility (e.g. performance), and the very processes which constitute its meaning. Now, technology sets a starting point for bringing the interactions between these two orders to attention. Conceptions of physical and social identity, physical and social alienation are spotlighted the moment that your body is not yours.

Being opened to the outside means engaging in processes which can control you, which might hurt you. You feel. Your body is controlled from the outside. You are a cyborg. You are a machine (D&G, but also Wiener: Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine). What is this that happens to you? And what do you have to do with it?

Let me elaborate on the net-aspect another time ^^;

I can only tell you this much: If you’re too far away (or just too immobile to attend ^^), you can also see the whole thing on Second Life (no exclamation mark, although this is an interesting aspect). Projections from Real Life will be seen in Virtual Reality, and Projections from VR will be seen in RL. You can get there by this link: netBody on SL. Also, feel free to take a look here Rob’s blog, and here Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Did I mention that I have been becoming a posthumanist recently?

^^ Some of you might have got that already, so here’s another piece of that from the last couple of months.

I mentioned this Robotic Exoskeleton in the foregoing post, so let me tell you some more about it. It is part a a perfomance artwork by Suguru Goto. I was, together with a couple of other persons, involved in the development of the shoulder mechanism. What we did was figuring out how a wearable, computer-controlled mechanism could be achieved that would allow for a a human shoulder joint to be externally controlled. We did some research into anatomy, mechanics/mechatronics, work out some ideas, built some simple prototypes, and finally came up with what we got now. It is quite a simple mechanism consisting of two motors per shoulder. Lots of testing and adjustment followed. Then it had to be integrated with other parts, i.e. elbow-, wrist-, and head control. Suguru came up with a lot of that. Here’s him and the Exoskeleton in an in-between stage:

The performance will be next Monday, a post on this is following soon. Everybody will be invited!

Let me just give you an impression of the robot exoskeleton I and some other people (don’t want to reveal too much at this point) have been working on for some time. We’re not finished at all, and what you can see in the video is the person controlling the skeleton and not the other way round, because the motors did not wanna work today … Anyway, I guess you already got it: the movement of the person in this suit is going to be controlled by someone else …

May 2nd, 2008, Morgan Packard will give a concert at FYW (Cologne Ehrenfeld). Please see flyers below.

Together with Ezekiel Honig, Morgan Packard released on acclaimed Microcosm Music NY (alongside Miskate et al. taking a naturalist, or corporeal turn towards sampling in electronic (dance) music), later on Anticipate Recordings which through his album “Airships Fill The Sky” and releases by Ezekiel Honig, Mark Templeton, Klimek, and Sawako became co-defining for contemporary music – don’t miss the freely downloadable Summer Tour Remixes!

Airships Fill The Sky, by employing instrumental elements, sampling and synthesis – i.e. representation, performance and simulation – poses questions about relations between sound, music, nature, motion, feeling, technology and mind. Packard plays the accordion in a way that investigates material properties of the instrument in an expressive context – the instrument not mainly as a tool to express artistic or musical concepts, but as a body expressive of itself, of its physical properties and meanings, which cannot just be infererred by myself and applied to an otherwise dead matter, but are in direct relation to this thing, and of homologous properties of a human body – the instrument breathes, feels, as I synchronise my breath, my feeling.

Here, already, simulation takes place: Myself as a mind–body, capable of conveying a universal connection between sense and matter, cannot only acknowledge the expressiveness of the instrument and the processes that surround it, but I can reflect and describe all this (what I maybe need representational power to) in order to communicate. This becomes possible as feeling is in all things, and breathing in it’s meaningful, expressive aspects relies on my knowing about how it feels to have a body which breathes.

Thus, the instrument becomes part of myself in a twofold sense: its breathing as breathing is simulated in my capability to abstract from my own concrete bodily states and draw the meaning of a thing breathing from my own breathing (it breathes through myself, or technically: I run a simulation of it breathing on my hardware, which is not all that ‘hard’, as it/myself knows about breathing); and my own breathing as breathing becomes realised in the instrument, i.e. the instrument is an integral part of my conception of breathing, of its meaning, of what it is for myself.

Sure, there’s a stricter way to grasp simulation, which we encounter when we meet the natural beauty of the simulacrum. To make it clear, hearing the sound of SuperCollider determining the synthetic aspects of Packard’s music is bliss. But apart from this production esthetics, the simulational power of SC presents us a dynamic representation which is becoming natural – it’s arguable whether this would be representational at all, and also, whether I assume too much about the actual simulational effects here. What I hear is the following: imagine a field of hollow bamboo canes as they could be used to build panpipes. Some of them touch one another, others stand apart from one another, imagine now a process that partially blows, partially shakes these, namely with a dynamic that reminds of unsteady, but strong and playful wind rattling at your door, shaking the bamboo façade of your cozy shed.

Again we are confronted with a very much material, dynamical and sounding process, but this time probably without a body proper in the first place. Again, we do not seem to deal with an absolute disembodiment here, but with a simulation which does not consist in an irreality or disembodied virtuality, but in a virtuality consisting in ourselves which can be realised though this very simulational process.

Luckily, as I am not capable of giving a complete account for what makes me appraise Airships Fill The Sky in this manner, I will stop here. Hope to see you on Friday!

Thanks to cramo for making this happen!!

See Morgan Packard’s webpage, where you can also download the SuperCollider instrument – thanks, Morgan!

For a long time, but without success, I tried to get my Wiimote to work as a volume control for my Powerbook G4. The problem with the free software Darwiinremote always was that mapping the volume keys to Wiimote doesn’t seem possible.

That problem is partially solved now. The free software PTHVolume lets you define any other shortcut which can then be mapped to Wiimote using Darwiinremote.

Still, it’s not perfect. PTHVolume misses a customisable shortcut for the option-shift-volume combination which under 10.5 Leopard controls the volume in smaller increments. And, but that’s only an aesthetic issue, you can’t hide the PTHVolume icon from the menu bar as you can do with the normal volume icon.

Anyway, find PTHVolume here, and Darwiinremote here.

Quicksilver for Mac OS X is a launcher very much based on keyboard input.

It works by bringing up an alt-tab-style menu via a definable hotkey combination and a search algorithm for finding items matching your input, which works almost instantly. Define which parts of your system are searched, so it’s fine to just serve for starting applications.

You can get much deeper into it, though. Do not only display applications, but any objects. Do not just launch, but use any other action in an application or on an object. Query an online dictionary for input text. Email a paper to your friend. Do it all with just a few keystrokes.

You can find the freely distributed software here.

Dan Dickinson’s blog presents a lovely introduction to using the code.

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL Switzerland provides the series Talking Robots.

Here you will find all the big names chattering away on your favourite topic in HRI, Robotics, and AI.

Hegel, F./Krach, S./Kircher, T./Wrede, B./Sagerer, G. (2008), Theory of Mind (ToM) on Robots: A Neuroimaging Study

Hegel and colleagues present (preliminary) results of a neuroimaging study on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Theory of Mind (ToM). What they are interested in, is whether the shape of the interacting partner (human, anthropomorphic robot, functional robot, computer) in a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game scenario would have an influence on the measured activity in ToM brain areas (medial prefrontal lobe, anterior cingulate cortex).

Theory of Mind at wikipedia.en

Human-Robot Interaction at wikipedia.en

This is a better way of doing it, just like I am better at doing it all by now I guess (still need some hope tho … ^^). Anyway, one part of the old site shall be kept, as I really like the look. Credit for processing the background image goes to aleks.

Basically, it’s three pages with some basic info on camara-based motion tracking. It’s still useful (though some links are dead by now), and can be found here.

“There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion. The new conception involved is that of reality.” (The Fixation of Belief)