Phantom touch, our CYBORGIAN present

As some of you know, our DW team is working on the implementation of a haptic device driven by brain waves in collaboration with the Neuroprosthetic Research Group under the direction of Dr. Justin Sanchez. Their goal is to develop novel BIONIC medical treatments This has many applications, primarily for disabled people that have lost limbs or are paralyzed.

This is a graphic I made for Dr.Sanchez. Check out his presentation Co-Evolution of Man and Machine: Neuroprosthetics in the 21st Century.

This is a particular area of interest to me since I started experimenting with cursor control via electrical body feedback in the early nineties although my focus was more as a game designer, which is what I was doing at the time.

Here are some pics of my biofeedback contraption. I built my own "electrodes" which connected to the battery snaps at the back, but I could not find them for this post. Of course all of this can now be done with a cheap microprocessor with a much better clock rate. I remember spending a few hundred dollars thinking that gamers would be interested in such input device, but, alas, it was not so. True, it took a lot of training and effort to move the darn cursor, but it worked, lazy bastards!

Old 37 pin PC-Lab 750 parallel card built on a prototyping board by Advantec

If I was doing this by myself again I would probably use a parallel processor like the Propeller by Parallax which would be quite enough to achieve a much better result for a fraction of the cost and would be a lot of fun, anybody?.

Here is another approach well implemented by those cool Norwegians. Thanks to Master New Media Designer extraordinaire Virgil Wong for the link.

The Fractal Path

Our Fractal, Algorithmic Nature

Being as we are at the verge or perhaps in the middle of that threshold or bifurcation of our own destiny, it is hard if not impossible to observe with parsimony the course of action. In that liminal state where turbulence becomes organized into myriad eddies and flows and the “singularity” approaches, every theory or hypothesis seems to have some validity since the information or data we analyze is particular to our point of view and seldom encompasses a bigger picture.

Gregory Bateson, reminiscing about the Macy conferences,1 goes further by suggesting that we never know the world as such. He states that “We are our epistemology” since we only perceive and understand the world through what our sensory apparatus allows.

However the birthing environment of the open network where data itself acts as a “controlling agent”2 is beginning to show a pattern that is itself fed back into the system, and once the critical threshold is achieved, some theorists suggest3 it will give raise to the emergence of a machinic consciousness.

Introduction to Roboethics and Performance, Arturo Sinclair, 2008

1 It was at the Macy Conferences that Norbert Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’.

2 Manuel Delanda, “War in the age of intelligent machines” Swerve Editions, New York 1991, p163

3 Hofstadter ,"Godel, Escher, Bach" Zenon Pylyshyn, Mind Design Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing

Stelarc

Stelarc's Handswriting "Evolution"

Maki Gallery, Tokio, 22 May 1982. Photo by Akiro Okada

“…Working in the interface between the body and the machine, he employs virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, the Internet and biotechnology. Stelarc’s art includes physical acts that don’t always look survivable-or as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, “sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality.” (From Stelarc, The Monograph, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2005)

Is the actor, artist, filmmaker, farmer, soldier, different in any fundamental way in terms of the reality of his/her life? Are the players of online games, a stripper in Second Life, an Ebay entrepreneur, living a life less “real” than the banker, the Jihadist or the Olympic marathon runner? And if so, what or where is the difference? Is it in the space where the performance takes place, is it the intensity of pain or pleasure or the time spent in a particular activity that defines reality? if not, then what? How is performance different from real life (RL)? How is RL different from virtual life (VL)? How do both coexist? Other than questions of embodiment, which many theoreticians deal with, they are in a certain way indistinguishable from each other. In Koyaanisqatski, architectfilmmaker Godfrey Reggio evidences how humans are part of the pattern or flow of information that constitutes the world at large. The utilization of technical means such as high speed or time-lapse photography allows Reggio to discover and reveal those things that make us who we are in the time and place where we find ourselves, in this “life out- of-balance”.

From "Roboethics and Performance"
Arturo Sinclair, Krems 2008