Hacking the body

This conference paper is available to download from the publisher’s website at the link below.Hacking the Body is a proposed collaborative re-search project that explores the use of the concept of 'hacking' to repurpose and re-imagine internal signals from the body through DIY biosensors and soft circuits. This paper outlines definitions of hacking and how these apply to workshops exploring how to create these sensors

Hacking the Body 2.0 performance

The current technology fervour over wearable technology that collects user’s intimate body data, under the pretence of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time that critical questions were raised. The ethics of corporate ownership of body data for consumerist agendas is rarely discussed beyond the fine print on these devices. More awareness and education on these issues, would potentially allow more access, ownership, and creativity in the use of one's own body data, and ways to express personal identity through this data. This project questions how body data may be able to demonstrate who we are, through movement, through our physiology. How might access to personal data enable the performer to show their identity, rather than what is subscribed by the corporation making the sensing device? How might we explore these issues while enabling people access to their own data, especially in performance contexts, in order to interact with it? We recently staged 2 performances of the 2 pieces developed for this stage of the project in London, UK (February 16th) and in Sheffield, UK (February 18th) – the first piece: 1) flutter/stutter – haptic costumes with 'tickle motor' actuation and custom vibe actuators, with sound feedback for the audience linked to the touch interaction; and 2) feel me – costumes with a mix of hacked off-the-shelf wearable tech garments with breath and heartrate sensors, with custom smart textile vibe motor actuators and a custom iPad interface for choreographic and audience interventions or 'live coding'. This new iteration of the collaborative project Hacking the Body 2.0, by media artist Camille Baker and media artist/choreographer Kate Sicchio, attempts to address the ethical issues around identity and data ownership when using wearable tech in performance. The project develops methods to use and hack commercial wearable devices, as well as making handmade e-textiles sensing devices for performance. As such, we encourage performers to access their own physiological data for personal use, but also to create unique and interactive performances. Excerpt of new video of these performances will shown and the costumes will be available (non-functioning mode) for questions and discussion

Hacking the Body 2.0: Flutter/Stutter

Flutter/Stutter is an improvisational dance piece, part of the Hacking the Body 2.0 project, that uses networked soft circuit sensors to trigger sound and haptic actuators in the form of a small motor that tickles the performers. Dancers embody the flutter of the motor and respond with their own movement that reflects this feeling. This research explores using the concept of hacking data to repurpose and re-imagine biofeedback from the body. It investigates understandings of states of the body and hacking them to make new artworks such as performance and costumes. Through performance we aim to communicate to the public new ways to engage with their bodies and technology with intimacy and sensation embedded in wearables

Hacking the Body 2.0 performance: Flutter/Stutter

Flutter/Stutter is an improvisational dance piece, part of the Hacking the Body 2.0 project, that uses networked soft circuit sensors to trigger sound and haptic actuators in the form of a small motor that tickles the performers. Dancers embody the flutter of the motor and respond with their own movement that reflects this feeling. This research explores using the concept of hacking data to repurpose and re-imagine biofeedback from the body. It investigates understandings of states of the body and hacking them to make new artworks such as performance and costumes. Through performance we aim to communicate to the public new ways to engage with their bodies and technology with intimacy and sensation embedded in wearables

Open-source, custom interfaces and devices with live coding in participatory performance

This conference paper is available to download from the publisher’s website at the link below.This paper will discuss the use of open-source, custom interfaces and live coding in artworks and performance practices, using emerging devices that focus on revealing hidden, intimate and sensuous code of the body for manipulation and play. This paper review the new landscape of open-source artworks, with recent examples of such artworks, as well as one by the author, resulting in a new performance aesthetic that uses 'hacked' commercial, mobile and gaming devices for live coding, performance and interactive artworks. It discusses how dancers, live artists, musicians and others are participating in the DIY and 'Maker' movement, to create exciting wearable electronics and mobile applications for performance enhancement. The author will consider the possibilities of playful, expressive, gestural, and live coding, as well as using the DIY Maker ethos in multi-sensory particpatory performances with new devices. The author's own artistic research has involved re-combinatory practices and hybridisations of participatory performance, mobile media, wearable biofeedback sensors and live database interaction in a recent performance project MINDtouch. Her new collaborative work Hacking the Body, is about making participatory performances and interactive dance pieces that expose 'code' of the inner body

Biohacking Labs in Libraries

The Information Age continues to evolve. Technological advances with its innovations continue. Its impact on the individual and society continue unabated. The term biohacking is a combination of two words, biology and hacking. Hacking from the Oxford English dictionary can be used as a noun, like the name of a place, people, or sports etc(Oxford, 2022). In technology, hackers in the dictionary also have a sinister meaning. They are those who escape security to access unauthorised data such as on your phone, email, website, or computer. Biohackers are people who try to improve/optimise biological performance, which otherwise work normally, with technological intervention. Biohacking is the process of exploring, tinkering, understanding the possibilities of biological building blocks and equipment, and expanding its potential with home experiments and do it yourself gear, merging body modifications with technology(Robbins, T., 2022). This is the new frontier in innovation at the confluence of technology and biology. The innovation is now with the body itself, to improve the body performance, to maintain a healthy lifestyle , through personal data acquisition, and open source medicine, and knowledge

Review of Douglas Thomas, “Hacker Culture”

This article reviews the book '“Hacker Culture” by Douglas Thomas

Philosophy and the Apparatus of Disability

Abstract and Keywords Mainstream philosophers take for granted that disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That these assumptions are contestable, that it might be the case that disability is a historically and culturally specific, contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a natural attribute or property that certain people possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained. This chapter draws on the insights of Michel Foucault to advance a historicist and relativist conception of disability as an apparatus (dispositif) of power and identify mechanisms of power within philosophy that produce the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in the discipline. Keywords: disability, Michel Foucault, apparatus, historicist, relativist, underrepresentation of disabled philosopher