In "Optical Media" by Friedrich Kittler

"We knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors"

"at the moment of imminent death, a rapid time-lapse film of an entire former life is projected once again in the mind's eye... the soul suddenly stopped being a memory in the form of wax slates or or books, as Plato describes it; rather, it was technically advanced and transformed into a motion picture"


"The only thing that can be known about the soul or the human are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time."


Media have become privileged models, according to which our own self-understanding is shaped, precisely because their declared aim is to deceive and circumvent this very self-understanding.


In other words, technical media are models of the so-called human precisely because they were developed strategically to override the senses....

• 24 frames-per-second
• sampling rate of audio
• resolution of image

Food for thought:

- Prosthetics (what does the world look like if prosthetics are fully normalized into society -- Olympics, fashion?)



"My 12 pairs of legs" Aimee Mullins


- Sputniko's MENSTRUATION MACHINE
- Alba D'Urbano's Hautnah (close to skin)
- MIT Media Lab (Im)possible Baby Project


- MIT Media Lab projects

• Skrin
• Listen Tree
• Tree Sense
• DuoSkin

Food for thought:

- Scenes that captures a sense of what it is like living with augmented reality (Tom Cruise Minority Report, Sherlock, Bladerunner)





Stacy Tyrell's Backra Build, Great White Hope
- Before & After by Esther Honig
- Stelarc [wikipedia]
- Orlan [wikipedia]
- Cindy Sherman
- Morimura Yasumasa