Week 6 : Responding to my creative impulses 🤖

This week I focused on sourcing, making and creating things using accessible materials. I responded to my creative impulses and made objects to spark some inspiration.

Part ① : Shopping for Materials 🛒

Taking cues from practioners such as Jan Hakon Erichsen, which I curated last week, I prepared a shopping list of tools and went to a nearby hardware store to kickstart my making process.

Part ② : Extending Body Senses 🔎

By experimenting with materials to extend my bod, the objective was to examine my interest in various form of an ‘extended senses’. Inspired by the materials used by various artists and designers, I indulged in my imagination through four different exercises covering my hands and face. The following slides break down my thought process, learnings and reflection in working on each of the exercises. To narrowing down the form of extension I prefer.

2Ⓑ – Human Flappers 🤦🏻‍♂️

Determined to make the string mechanism work, I decided to work with a simpler idea. Experimenting with paper, string and tapes, I tried extended my face with petals sticked onto strings. This experiment met my objective of engaging my extensions with strings.

2Ⓒ – Snail Head 🐌

In my next exercise, I was prompted by the fact that snails have poor sense of sight. They just sense the world with either dark or light light. They don’t see colour. So I embarked on a mission to make a snail head, which I still have not finished. It is still ongoing and I have plans to make it happen.

2Ⓓ – Cable Head 🔗

Inspired by Shoji Yamasaki’s cable-tie, I was curious about cable-tie as a material as an extension of my head. While exploring, I found a way to engage the extension by sticking parts of the cable tie to my jaw.

All in all, the experiments were good. The pretence of being an automated machine reminded the atelier of the term “Machinal Turk.”. Machinal Turk is a comes from a famous 18th-century hoax: a chess-playing machine that appeared to play autonomously but had a hidden human operator inside. Now, the term has been reimagined by Amazon an online platform where businesses can outsource small, simple tasks to a large pool of workers who complete them for payment.

The idea of hidden human assistance intrigues me, however, when I was questioned about how these experiments meet my research objectives, I couldn't give a straightforward answer. It was at this moment, I realised I needed to iron out my readings to provide a foundation for more learnings.

Part ③ : Defining Concept and Back to Figuring Things Out! 🛒

Returning to last week's question of how well I can convey the interest in this interaction with non-human species. I learned about Gabrys's "Program Earth" and the term "interspecies" where computational sensors or electronic devices are used to encourage people to care more about our planet with a goal of mutually benfitting human and non-human entities.