Synopsis:
To propagate, capitalism seeks to annihilate space by time. (Marx, Grundrisse). Development of technology is key in this process: from horse to car, from car to plane, from plane to spaceshuttle. Internet is even more emblematic. Ultra-distant resources are available at the millisecond. The routes they take to arrive at your computer are selected opportunistically by algorithms. And packets may transit all around the globe to recompose a resource on your screen. Packets don't follow the shortest route but the fastest one. David Harvey describes this phenomenon as time/space compression. By compressing space by time, abstract spaces are created. It doesn't mean that space is absent but that it is transformed into abstraction (airports, highways). Consider digital networks. We forget about the machinery and the materiality that is necessary for them to operate: the composite of hardwares, cables and electricity leaves place to a global impression of a never-ending text. The uniformity (Uniform Resource Locator) of the World Wide Web comes at the price of abstracting its material structure to turn it into a large document that we 'browse'.
Interconneted hardware devices act therefore as time/space compressors. And they are not without paradoxes. Although they are supposed to help build an abstract plane on which capital can flow indifferently, they carry insisting questions. Cellphone users keep asking: Where are you?
Another paradox lies in their relationship to time. Built to compress space by time, they are themselves quickly obsolete. It is as if the speed they allow to gain over material resistance make them subject to aging proportionally. Hardware devices, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, pay the price of the maintenance of global communication as an abstract plane.
What is, then, the potential for these devices to become de-compressors of time by space?
How, by opening their circuitry, their sealed envelopes can we re-localise them? What is their potential for re-materialisation?
What would be instant communication if every packet transmitted would keep the trace of the level of freedom of expression of all the countries it crosses to arrive to your screen?
What would be entertainment if every graphic card would sing the names of the maquilladoras who assembled them?
Embedded technology is less great when it starts rotting inside us. Can the idylic image of the brave young cyborg b kept up when age marches on?Now wasted chips have become the most poluting factors, what happens to the bodies they have become part of? Karin Spaink and Fuller's media ecologies.
A programme mixing ecological and social questions around aging technologies.
Collaboration with FOAM.
Works:
Graham Harwood, Lungs, http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi?Lungs
Alejandra, vj9
Inspiration:
- Embodiment of the technology:
The example of the Cochlear implant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant
A Cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. Unlike hearing aids, the cochlear implant does not amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with electrical impulses. External components of the cochlear implant include a microphone, speech processor and transmitter which also allows an individual to adjust the sound for quality and amplification.
The implant is body + device but the device is also sensorial simulation It transcodes the signal, not just amplifies it. Aging cyborgs and prothesis → Christophe Lazaro thesis on prothesis and law.
- Simulating age with an exoskeleton:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/04/0417_btw/index_01.htm?chan=magazine+channel_the+business+week
How To Drive Like An Old Guy
Elderly drivers make up a growing share of Japan’s auto market—and its accident statistics, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK. Now, to help them drive more safely (and comfortably), engineers at Nissan are donning “old” suits that simulate the effects of aging. “It’s not always practical to recruit older motorists for product research,” says design engineer Etsuhiro Watanabe. –Ian Rowley
- Simulating eye disorders with glasses
There are glasses that simulate all kinds of eye disorders http://www.richmondeye.com/simulation.asp
- Inflatable exoskeleton for caretakers to become stronger
On the Foam wiki there is a page with inflatable wearables → in that part there are some beautiful exoskeletons Scroll to 3 http://libarynth.org/inflatable_wearables
- Simulating osteoporoses through computermodels
A biotechnology department working on osteoporose (biomechanics and tissue engineering) https://venus.tue.nl/owinfo-cgi/owi_0695.opl?vakcode=8Q013
- Design and elders
→ a project of Doors of Perception dating from 2000. Imagine a world where every second European adult is over fifty years old. And where two-thirds of disposable consumer income is held by this age-group. By 2020 this will be a reality. There will be huge demand for services that enable older people to live independently in their own communities as they age…. More here: http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2000/01/design_and_elde.php
“This first phase strongly reinforced our team's intuition that older people want to be more ‘present’ in their communities, to sustain active fulfilling and independent lives; to develop new communication skills; to increase their involvement in the local community; and thereby to develop a fresh sense of purpose, self-esteem and belonging. Apart from this emerging insight into what it is like to be old in Europe today, the early Presence investigations into communication patterns identified blockages and dysfunctions into the communication contexts of elderly people: these blockages or gaps became a list of service and product opportunities for people of all ages.”
- Wikipedia on cyborgs
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e., an organism that has both artificial and natural systems). The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.[1] D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction by Manfred Clynes, who wrote of a “new frontier” that was “not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between 'inner space' to 'outer space' -a bridge…between mind and matter.”[2] The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enhanced abilities due to technology,[3] but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback.
Fictional cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts, and frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and empathy. Fictional cyborgs may be represented as visibly mechanical (e.g. the Borg in the Star Trek franchise or Amber from the game Project Eden); or as almost indistinguishable from humans (e.g. the “Human” Cylons from the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica). One of the most famous fictional cyborgs was the Six Million Dollar Man, an American television series about a fictional cyborg. These fictional portrayals often register our society's discomfort with its seemingly increasing reliance upon technology, particularly when used for war, and when used in ways that seem to threaten free will. They also often have abilities, physical or mental, far in advance of their human counterparts (military forms may have inbuilt weapons, amongst other things). Real cyborgs are more frequently people who use cybernetic technology to repair or overcome the physical and mental constraints of their bodies. While cyborgs are commonly thought of as mammals, they can be any kind of organism.
According to some definitions of the term, the metaphysical and physical attachments humanity has with even the most basic technologies have already made them cyborgs.[4] In a typical example, a human fitted with a heart pacemaker or an insulin pump (if the person has diabetes) might be considered a cyborg, since these mechanical parts enhance the body's “natural” mechanisms through synthetic feedback mechanisms. Some theorists cite such modifications as contact lenses, hearing aids, or intraocular lenses as examples of fitting humans with technology to enhance their biological capabilities; however, these modifications are no more cybernetic than would be a pen, a wooden leg, or the spears used by chimps to hunt vertebrates.[5] Cochlear implants that combine mechanical modification with any kind of feedback response are more accurately cyborg enhancements.
The prefix “cyber” is also used to address human-technology mixtures in the abstract. This includes artifacts that may not popularly be considered technology. Pen and paper, for example, as well as speech, language. Augmented with these technologies, and connected in communication with people in other times and places, a person becomes capable of much more than they were before. This is like computers, which gain power by using Internet protocols to connect with other computers. Cybernetic technologies include highways, pipes, electrical wiring, buildings, electrical plants, libraries, and other infrastructure that we hardly notice, but which are critical parts of the cybernetics that we work within.
[edit]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg
Words:
geriatric robot -
slowtech -
aging cyborg -
retired cyborg -
replacement parts -
backward and forward compatability -
A-Z of Robots: http://www.btinternet.com/~reg.joy/AtoZ.htm
For Stitch and Split Gent 2009: propose retired scenario's → looking at contemporary fairly low tech cyborgs (the elderly now) → making fiction with that → making a story and sharing it
(very light: film Robots & Wall-e)