→ About
Hello!
This website collects the process, references, conlusions and future directions of BODY 2.0, the MFA thesis project ofDaniel Lara at the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design.
The Navigation/Diagram on the left allows to have an overview of my path of inquiry, and how subjects and experiments connect to my final project. You can click on the links to go to the appropiate content, or scroll down to quickly review all of it.
You can find more documetation of the process on my thesis blog: www.daniellara.com/mdp/thesis
Please visit www.daniellara.com to view a portfolio of my current work.
[ April, 2011 ]
→ BODY 2.0
Body 2.0 embraces the day-to-day complexities that are a byproduct of “Ubiquitous Body Computing” and a fully networked world. This project focuses on unique features, uncommon banalities and possible absurdities of our near future.
Our increasing attachment and dependence on mobile phones seem to bridge the gap towards the Body 2.0, where our actions are integrated to the internet, and where new paradigms exist for privacy, social control and human interactions. Beyond the new possible features, I am interested in the idiosyncrasies, clumsiness, and possible absurdities. I want to investigate a near future where we naturally embrace the complex dependence on technology and evolve with it.
How do I develop a process that doesn't flatten the complexities of the subject matter? And furthermore, if the process embodies complexity, how would it leak positively to the project without creating more confusion? My approach starts by designing objects, systems, and interfaces. Next, I construct the environments where my designs live and study the side effects through video scenarios. This offers me a natural contraposition that provides me with multiple perspectives.
The affordances offered by mobile technologies are not simple. We are complex beings with flaws and strengths that are synchronized in a poetic chaos. In order to get a complete idea of what lies ahead, I need to look beyond optimistic visions of the future, which could be misleading since the side effects of the advancements are missing. I aim to embrace the near future with its pros and cons, and engage in processes that give me access to the full complexity.
[ Link to HD version in Vimeo]
→ Conclusions
• This project is about embracing the complexities of our everyday relationship with technology and our evolution with it. In order to portray a banal and mundane near future, it was helpful to consciously avoid dystopian and utopian futures, since I ran the risk of flattening the nuances I was interested in playing out.
• Because we are used to stereotyped versions of the future, and very used to optimistic versions, realistic portrayals fall easily in the dystopian end. It seems we are trained to the promise of a “better” future that is flattened and not complex. Bringing the "middle ground" as a design space seems to be more challenging.
• The absurdities of today could be the clues for tomorrow's everyday.
• Making video-scenarios as a process and NOT as a final destination kept the inquiry open. When I stop looking for the "final", "glossy" film finish, I shifted the project to be about design instead of a Film Thesis.
• Since the videos illustrate a future full of implanted bodies, I was expecting more reactions remanent of the cyborg discourse. Nevertheless, the discussion never went in that direction.
→ Future Directions
• Since the future is about the present, this design fiction has triggered a space for tinkering and innovation. One of the open paths of inquiry triggered is the evolution of the desktop model in a future where people are fully immersed in a networked world. As a way to look for new interactions, I consciously stepped away from the affordances of interactive tables and touch screens and put the control of the devices in fictional digit-implants. What remain was a new relationship with the chair as a work space and as a controller.
Thinking in "Present" terms, I wonder if the interactivity of the mouse/keyboard/table be translated or transposed to the chair and if it could offer new possibilities to the desktop model. Could we include different parts of our body while using the computer instead of just the wrists and fingers? Could we “click-tap” with our left foot and scroll with the right foot? How could computer-work be not so static for the body and help its active nature instead of fighting against it?
→ Constellation of References
Here is my constellation that shows how quotes and references relate to one another and to the project. Click on the image to open a hi-resolution PDF document:
→ Bibliography
Click on this link to see a Bibliography in PDF format.
→ Video Iterations
In this version I explored the realities of having a networked body, but sometimes I was overexplaining through the script. For the final version I decided to focus on the relationship of the doctor with the patients, since the articulation of the problems would help understand the situation without overexplaining.
→ Re-written Statement
Mobile technology is playing an determinant role in our everyday lives. Mobiles are pervasively around us, in very close proximity. We carry them all day long making sure they are quickly accessible to us. We sleep next to them, wake up through their alarms. We feel misplaced if we leave them behind. They are a summary of our private information and behavioral patterns: a digital portrait. People waiting around are rarely not looking at a mobile screen. We need them not just for communication, but also for navigation, for keeping and sharing a memory archive (through photos and videos), for entertainment, for social interactions and financial transactions.
What would prevent the dependence on mobile technology from becoming part of our biological necessities? Is it that smart-phones are becoming more like clothing? At some point in human history clothing became part of the body. We are wrapped in clothes since birth and most societies in the world use clothes. Clothing is more than mere protection, it is also used as a signifier for status, morals, emotions and self-expression.
So, if we are in a transition towards the Network-Body, or the “Body 2.0”, where external devices will become part of our personal necessities and identity, what would be the implications of that? And more specifically, what would happen if we have to live older for longer, surrounded and dependent on technology? How will our aging neurons catch up with faster computing power that would accelerate media saturation around us? Would the plasticity of the brain adapt to the new environment? What would be the drawbacks?
This is not a project about prosthetics. It is not about body-enhancement or the relationship of the machine inside the body. It is about our natural adaptation and growing dependence on the technology that surround us, and our evolution with it.
This project investigates a possible near future not from the optimal achievements of the “Body 2.0”, but through its idiosyncrasies, mistakes, clumsiness, and possible absurdities. We are complex beings with flaws and strengths that are synchronized in a poetic chaos. In order to get a complete idea of what lies ahead, we need to look beyond the dangerous optimistic visions of the future (where you never taste the side effects of the advancements). We need to embrace the new conditions with their pros and cons, and the full complexity.
→ Scripts / Storyboards
While writing the scenarios I discovered that the tension between the positive and the negative elements of the technology was an important part of the narrative because it avoided a preachy attitude. I realized my intent is not to persuade, but to provoke.
→ Hand-Phone prototype
If we would have sensors embedded in our bodies, how could I taste it? This is an attempt to imagine what it would be to have digit implants in our hands. The prototype feels skeuomorphic, but it helped me trigger video-scenarios where people are fully networked through their bodies.I extended the microphone, speaker and answering button out of the case of a cellphone so I could tape it to my fingers and talk with my hand.
→ Story
(The following story was useful to start situating a reality in the future.)
"Sometimes I think of the good old times, especially the 10’s, when people used to put so much effort into describing things. People used to project themselves with the descriptions and it was fun to position myself in their shoes and try to decipher their motivations, their interests and inner drive. I would get annoyed though, when people would repeat the same story two or three times. But that would just highlight their main focus.
Now we have the constant feed of actions of everybody we know. Young people don’t have another reference, they assume it as natural. Maybe it is natural. Maybe we were meant to communicate like this. At least my thoughts are not being recorded yet! Anyway it is really helpful. I could not be 81 and in my mental prime. Without the stupid technology my memories and experience wouldn’t be useful. I would be pushed into a corner as an old relic, instead of working in my second dream job."
→ Diagram of Networked Body
This is the sketch that I used as a guide while constructing the design fiction. Click on the image to see a hi-res version:
→ Drawing Explorations
Below is a drawing that pointed me to focus on the dependancy on electronic objects for biological funcions, like sleeping. It also helped me confirm that drawing as a process is far more dynamic and liberating than looking for a "final-destination-drawing".
→ 1,000 Drawings
During the first week of the break I took a two week trip and actively chose NOT to think about my thesis project. It took me one week to snap out of my thesis framework of ideas and readings. I purposely did NOT read anything. I just took photographs. I used several cameras, but I was mostly driven to the low resolution and immediacy of my cellphone instead of the hi-resolution of a DSRL. I took about 700 photographs with my cellphone. Then I selected 100 of them and I decided to make 10 photoshop drawings out of each one so I could end up with 1,000 drawings. I wanted to produce a mind scan to make the ideas, which were at the forefront of my present interests, the most obvious. You can see the images here: http://daniellara.com/1000drawings
I also added some text to the 1,000 drawings website. I wrote 100 sentences (1 for each set of 10 drawings) and then I selected the ones that were more interesting or that could add some conceptual framing to the images.
The subjects that remain were Networks, the Dependancy on mobile phones, and the added layer of reality to the physical space.
→ Histories of the Future
(This writing excercise was very important because I re-discover the creative power of a design fiction, something I started in New Modes of Reading and Writing during the Spring of 2010.)
This is an article dated on 2017, titled “Autism as an Alternative to Ultimate Convenience: Current Findings”. It analyzes the history of Convenience and identifies the two main approaches to achieve Ultimate Convenience: the Convenient Suicide and the induced Autistic Alternate Disorder. Click on the image or HERE to download the PDF.
→ 2-Way Gun: Video
Once I did the 2-way gun, I wanted to explore the ways in which it could be used in a realistic way. I discovered that through video I could pin-point to specific meanings and affordances of the object.
→ 2-Way Gun: Object
Could I shift the perspective of an object or system that had a very strong 1-way relationship?
→ Collective Game
In this simple game, each member of a team has a mouse as a controller. The movements of the mice overlap, so the players have to adapt to their own team members' movements in order to accomplish the task of matching the brain icon with the body-figure without touching the lines.
How quickly would the the "team-mind" adjust to the collective task? Would strong wills get in the way? What could be an effective strategy?
→ Shifting Perspectives
Even though the idea of multiples has been in the forefront of my discussions (multiple futures, multiple personas) I am not interested in just generating multiple points of view. What I really like is the space, brief or not, of confusion and readjustment that people go through when they realize that there is another POV, in other words, when there is a shift in perspective.
I am interested in investigating perspective shifts because I think they can give us access to the rich space that sits in between different points of view. I really like the space of confusion and readjustment that people go through while realizing that there is another perspective.
Which shifts of perspective can we perform with today’s technology?
Which mental shifts are demanding technologies to be developed?
→ Skeuomorphs
Since the presentation That Garnet Hertz gave the mdp on the Spring of 2009, I found skeuomorphs fascinating. I was intrigued by how skeuomorphs contained links to obsolete designs that seamlessly merge with contemporary life. They are pervasive and not so easy to spot because you need to know the history of the influences embedded in the object (many times they are confused with mimicking or ornamental nostalgia). The skeuomorphs are in front of us with an “invisible” layer of meaning, and I think they have a narrative that matches the “language” of the collective mind. Below is a collection of excerpts that resonate with my hunch and that I want to incorporate in my thinking and making:
Katherine Hayles, in How we became posthuman:
• SKEUOMORPH is a design feature that is not longer functional itself, but refers back to a feature that was functional at another time.
• SKEUOMORPHS visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication.
• In the history of cybernetics, skeuomorphs acted as threshold devices, smoothing the transition between one conceptual constellation and another.
Nicholas Gessler, in Skeuomorphs and cultural algorithms:
• [Skeuomorphs] are informational attributes of artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory. They help us map the new onto an existing cognitive structure, and in so doing, give us a starting point from which we may evolve additional alternative solutions.
• People adopt the most CONVENIENT set of BELIEFS consistent with their NEEDS, HOPES and FEARS at the time.
Garnet, Hertz:
• SKEUOMORPHS are created because the future is built out of the present
• SKEUOMORPHS invert obsolescence to overlap the future with the past.
→ Multiple Presents in the Collective Mind
I am interested in the tension and contradictions between mass culture and the individual. I think that the complexities of contemporary life have made us curate a convenient simplification that often hides our narrative gaps and the multiple personalities that we embrace depending on the context that surrounds us.
The fracture of The Global Village and the crisis of the Cultural Master Narratives has led me to notice the fragility behind scripted experiences. I want to explore the risks hidden in scripted experiences, the complexity of audiences, collective metaphors and narrative holes in order to better understand our diversified present and to use as a design space for our diversified future.
→ Complex Intersections
While trying to map some of my projects within the influences of art, design, technology and economics I started drawing 4 overlapping circles. I then realized that this kind of graph was too simple to serve my purpose, since there were missing “overlaps”. For instance, in the top graph below there is no area where economics and art meet each other without involving technology and design. At the end I figure a far more complex graph that matched my vision of the relationship of these fields:
→ Indivudual + The Masses
To start playing with the tension between the individual and the masses I used popcorn as a metaphor. Yes, a common place, but I wanted to get it out of my system and use it as a kind of entry point or marker:
The collage below intents to bring out the tensions of a personal moment that becomes mass consumption. I found the image at the bottom while browsing the newspaper some time ago, and it struck me that they preferred to use this image over one taken by the photographers on the picture to illustrate the event. From the caption I realized that there would be more photos at Getty Images, and I found the one on the top, where you can see the shadows of the photographers on the blue track. This images together bring out the media race to the forefront.
→ Multiple Futures
At the colloquium on Septembers 17th 2010, in the context of HCI and Sci-fi, Julian Bleecker mentioned the idea of diversified futures as a challenge to the idea of a single, big, collective future where all humanity should go.
Next Monday, I asked Norman Klein to talk about the idea of multiple futures and he started by mentioning Darwin as a unifying path for all humanity. Since there is one evolutionary line, Darwin’s path is closer to a single point of view, and to globalism (aiming to ONE thing).
In contrast, there are/were polytheistic societies (like India, or the Aztecs). That made me think that societies have their own visions and fantasies of the future and that the future is non-homogeneous. If we add that globalism is fractured, then the idea of multiple futures becomes very tangible.
Norman then mentioned the inevitable presence of the “master plan”, (governments, global economics…) and how in many cases suppresses the local interests, or in this case, the multiple futures. The ideal case would be that the initiatives from the local would work with the interests of the global, but that is the same than having all the multiple futures aligned in ONE future and unlikely to happen.
The drawing below is my summary of the idea of overlapping and competing futures that barely overlap:
→ Unmediated Experiences
The first excercise in Thesis Workshop was to be alert and have unmediated experiences. The first collection of observations were about the body sourrounded by devices. At the moment I had no idea about the subject of the final project, but I guess my intuition was very close.
→ THANK YOU!
Thank you very much to my creative, smart and challenging advisors: Phil van Allen (lead), Thea Petchler (writing), Garnet Hertz and Jennifer Krasinski. And to Ben Hooker, Anne Burdick, and Tim Durfee, who also gave me assertive and enlightening feedback.
