August 17, 2008
Oh, you wacky, wacky artists.
You know, after helping out on the Moaning Lisa, and at least answering questions for many other installation artists doing works on sex, gender, and tech, I really can't get away with a post title like that without sounding like a complete hypocrite, but, well, that's never stopped me before! So, off we go into the wild world of crazy art that's crazy.
Let's start with Cyberskin by Joan Healy. Sure, you've heard of cyberskin before, it's a term used for a sort of plastic that makes toys feel like the skin of a dead body after a few days in a lukewarm bath. Why do I know this? Science. Anyways, this interface is gonna have Apple eating their multitouch hearts out...
2 Stage Transfer Drawing(advancing to a future state) from Joan Healy on Vimeo.
So yeah. Looks like a bunch of people drawing on a multitouch pad, a simple sort of fingerpainting interface that shows up on the screen in front of them. The pad itself is supposed to have a warm, soft, fleshy feel that adds to the bond between people and machines. Which it does.
BECAUSE IT'S A (WO)MAN, BABY. Or, well, her back, at least.
Yup, that's Joan herself in the box, bent over and presenting her lower back as the touch pad. As people do their multitouchythingy on her, she relays the motion to a real touchpad.
My brain is currently fighting a war between "creepy" and "awesome" right now. It's bloody, too. You can see more of Joan's work at her website, which you'll get to if you click the thing you're reading right now.
On to picture number two...
Sweet living jesus fuck, I feel like I should just name this image "the internet" and stop writing altogether, because, well, it's just over, man. It's just over.
This is the "Virtual Transgender Suit", made by Mark Owen, the same guy that did the completely awesome Avatar Machine suit a while back. Accord to Regine, who can still describe this stuff without massive giggling and has my eternal respect for that talent,
[it] replicates the aesthetics of the typical virtual female form and catapults them within a real world context.
Yeah. That's certainly what it does, yup.
via neural.it and we make money not art, two blogs that still make my rss reader a lovely place to view the world from.
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November 13, 2007
Lie Back and Think of English Baseball
Lie Back and Think of English Baseball: S.O.C.D Project
Square dildos. Unless you're a shapey, it's probably not the hottest sexual interface out there. Even so, it's your link to a good time through mosaicked jubbies in the S.O.C.D. Project.
Grab onto the square latex extension, and the metal plates on it pick up your "arousal level". The more aroused you become, the more pixelated and noisy the porn playing on the monitor in front of you gets. Therefore, if you want crisp, clear Max Hardcore, you have to do everything you can not to actually get turned on by it, or at least to try and fool the sensors. Think of it like trying to fool a lie detector session where all questions relate to hardons.
A work by Fiona Raby, Anthony Dunne and Michael Anastassiades (Electronics: Erik Kearney, software: David Muth.). Currently part of Wouldn't it be nice, an exhibition, curated by Katya Garcia-Anton and Emily King, which addresses the application of wishful thinking in art and design today. You can visit the show until December 16 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, then at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich.
Thanks to We Make Money Not Art and sexblo.gs, both blogs of awesomeness, for pointing this out.
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July 19, 2005
The Journey to Wild Divine: Control through Biofeedback
The Journey to Wild Divine: Control through Biofeedback
The Journey to Wild Divine is a game played without joysticks. Instead, it is sold with a biofeedback device called the LifeStone that tracks Skin Conductance Level and Heart Rate Variance in order to open new paths in the game. That's right, it's a game about kickin' back and relaxing. That's it. If you can't chill, you lose.
There's an extension pack available that will also chart your progress and hand you back graphs of how you're doing in terms of relaxation training, and where you could stand to improve.
Well, some people meditate and do yoga to relax, others do, well, you know what they do if you're reading this page. The idea of using this as an online dominance/submission controller could be pretty interesting. Adding the feedback levels to a conferencing program would allow for teasing and pleasure denial on a whole new level... "Hey, calm down, I'm going off cam until your pulse drops...."
Proving that we can make (and will) make anything dirty...
