1. Essentials of the idea
Project “Body Ooze” is a project that illuminates possibilities and problems of spatial ooze of our body by interactive technology. We assume a future where even our body sense and biological information are expressed subconsciously in surrounding physical space.
We hypothesize that, in such future, an individual body image known as a personal space and an absolute field will be augmented spatially and, therefore, new possibilities and problems will appear as phenomena such as an incursion of others’ body senses, a synchronization and a contrariety with them.
This future can be regarded as an analogy of the situation in the informational space in which we subconsciously ooze our individual information onto WWW. Although now we don’t yet feel the interactions between the oozed egos, such interactions will take place in near future. This project is also set as a physicalization of such phenomena in informational space and as a critic of relationships between our body, information and space in future.
2. Production Plans
In this project, we made a primitive prototype, “Archi/e Machina,” in 2009. It has a huge tensegrity-based structure, an Infrared sensing system and a pneumatic muscle actuation system. It moves complexly according to human movement inside. We experimented the effect on the psychological impression of human inside by this prototype and elucidated the possibility of “Archi/e Machina” being perceived as an augmentation of his/her body.
The next step of this project is to create prototypes that can further the ooze of the body sense of its inhabitant and that can interact each other.
The new prototype senses a biological information of a participant that he can perceive but can hardly control and expresses it in the motion of the spatial structure that involves him/her. Sensed biological information will be selected from information such as heartbeat, myoelectric potential, breath, blinking and so on. Spatial structure will be constructed based on the structure of “Archi/e Machina,” tensegrity. Furthermore, multiple prototypes exist together so that phenomena like incursion, synchronization and contrariety of body senses take place by networking biological information of participants.
3.Technical details
Hardware can be divided into a sensing device and a spatial structure. The sensing device will be a biological information sensor with wireless communication. The spatial structure, based on tensegrity, will be constructed with aluminum pipes and steel wires. We use pneumatic muscles for actuator of the structure.
Software consists of PC programs such as Max/MSP patches. It computes biological information from the sensing device and actuates the pneumatic muscles. It also communicates biological information with other prototypes via network and modifies the actuation according to generated phenomena.
Spatial requirements for one prototype are: 5m:5m:4m (W:D:H) for spatial structure and 1m:1m:1m for background system. There will be 2 or 3 prototypes disposed.
