Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Hugs are Bluetooth enabled


The Hug Shirt : "When touching the red areas on your Hug Shirt your mobile phone receives the sensors data via Bluetooth (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, etc) and then delivers it to the other person."

Design of Restraint Systems

Design of Restraint Systems from the website of Temple Grandin, author of "Animals in Translation." Lance mentioned this during Kelly's critique, but I think it is also relevant to Clare's hug systems - the idea of the squeezebox, that restraint is in some way comforting. Lots of interesting information on this site. And strange slaughterhouse diagrams.

Mirrored contacts

"To Turn Upside Down Your Own Eyes", 1970, by Italian arte-povera artist Giuseppe Penone (image attributed to Paolo Pellion).

This interacts with both an internal and external space: although the public was probably greatly suprised to see themselves reflected in Giuseppe's eyes, he himself could not see through the mirrored lenses. If there was a public at all -- without one, how does the idea shift?

For those of us working with trees

Still document of "Living with a Log" by artist Hugh Pocock, in which a 42-foot, 2-ton log was placed inside a private residence. More images at http://hughpocock.net under "Projects". Not technically a body extension, yes, but certainly an interesting clash of human scale and tree scale.