Haptic Visualisations
As research assistant for Professor Sophia Brueckner, I created visual aids that help explain her conceptual art projects. Because her works are haptic in nature, understanding them often requires physical interaction. However, this is simply not possible when works need to be explained in presentations and grant applications. To address this problem, I worked closely with Sophia to develop illustrations that seek to communicate the visceral feeling one would feel if they were to experience the work.
Sophia Brueckner is a futurist/artist/designer/engineer advocating for critical optimism and extrapolative thinking as essential attitudes for imagining a positive future.
(Created with Procreate)
Empathy Amulet & Box
Taking inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Empathy Amulet and Box is a pair of networked appliances that connects many anonymous people through shared warmth. Click here and here to learn more about the projects.
"An empathy box," he said, stammering in his excitement, "is the most personal possession you have. It's an extension of your body; it's the way you touch other humans, it's the way you stop being alone." - Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Under One Sky
Under One Sky intends to exhibit as a projection where people share a space and observe sky footage generated by Sophia’s algorithm. The purpose of my illustrations is to highlight the symbolic detail that the algorithm samples sky footage documented by different people at different moments in time. Click here to learn more about the project.
Warming Wall
In collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs, the Warming Wall is an interactive installation that seeks to transform physical walls into interfaces that bridge incarcerated youth with the outside world through the sensation of warmth. Warmth is associated with human connection across cultures and the Warming wall leverages this to create an anonymous sense of presence and generosity between the incarcerated youth and the surrounding community.
Click here to learn more about the project.
Embodisuit
The purpose of my illustration is to highlight the flipped directionality of data where the user passively collects from the environment without further interpretation. Click here to learn more about the project.
“A collaboration with Rachel Freire, the Embodisuit allows its wearer to map signals onto different places on their body. It both critiques and offers an alternative to current trends in wearable technology. Most wearables harvest data from their users to be sent and processed elsewhere. The Embodisuit flips this paradigm. Informed by embodied cognition, the suit instead receives signals from an IoT platform, and each signal controls a different haptic actuator on the body. Knowledge is experienced ambiently without necessitating the interpretation of symbols by the conscious mind. The suit empowers wearers to reconfigure the boundaries of their selves strengthening their connection to the people, places, and things that are meaningful to them. Furthermore, we hypothesize that by changing the way people live with data, it will change the type of data that people create.”
