AP: themes, designs

Aram brought his acupuncture doll to the floor on Thursday, which opened up some new ideas – one of the things that Aram had expressed earlier was the visual connection between the multiple ‘nodes’ on the doll (connected by colour-coded lines) and the NYC subway map. This seemed an apt metaphor for the acupuncture process – the subway lines as veins or energy ‘meridians’, the flow of people through the city like a bloodstream. Acupuncture, as Aram explained, is about balance – in a simplified way, it’s about locating ‘congested’ areas on the body, places where there is an uneven distribution of resources. In this way, it’s a lot like a microcosm of a public transport system.

We’ve got our reservations about the correlation between the two systems coming off as a little too ‘cute’, but for now, it still seems like a potentially rich relationship to explore.

Acupuncture: research phase.

My first feelings about the interface for my idea were that it might begin as a kind of ‘game’, involving people applying ‘needles’ to some kind of doll or model to manipulate ‘flows of energy’, however I might choose to represent those.

I presented a vague sketch of my idea in Physical Computing class, and some new stuff emerged: Tom suggested that the project might have a valuable educational capacity (an aspect I hadn’t fully considered before), and some other people in the class suggested the the ‘model’ should be a 1:1, full-scale representation of a human form (I’d been thinking of it as a lot smaller). Tom also talked about the reality quotient – how far you can push ‘realism’ before it becomes creepy/undesirable/ultimately unrealistic. The trick, it seems, is to find a model for reality that exactly meets your needs, neither failing nor exceeding them.

The most important thing to come out of the class was a suggestion by Alex that I talk to Aram, who he said had some detailed knowledge and experience of acupuncture. Aram is in my ICM class (which is, in this case helpfully, just after my P-Comp class), and so I grabbed him seconds after it ended and asked if he’d being willing to share some of his knowledge with me sometime. What followed was many hours of conversation (and, in my case, education), after which Aram decided to leave his current Physical Computing group and, to my great joy, join the acupuncture project.

Though bursting with multiple ideas, we agreed on a couple of things: we didn’t want to create a strictly educational, entirely reverential expression of acupuncture – we both were more interested in using the model of acupuncture to express something more personal and maybe more emotionally charged than just an interactive ‘how it works’ piece – we felt strongly that the project shouldn’t be didactic in any way. Additionally, while not wanting to do away with all educational qualities of the work, we quickly realized that a full scale model wouldn’t serve any of our purposes – the actual acupuncture process is so complex and nuanced that the amount of knowledge we’d be able to express on a full body model would be necessarily limited. Better, we felt, to ‘accurately’ communicate one central part of acupuncture than attempt the capture everything about it (and, in doing so, risk misrepresentation).

Final project: Acupuncture Interface, first thoughts

Around the beginning of this year, I went to an acupuncturist. It’s not the kind of thing I usually do – those who know me best will attest to my general skepticism regarding…well, everything really. So entering into ‘alternative’ therapy, handing my body over to a person and a process that I knew so little about, was simultaneously thrilling, mystifying, amusing, and a little scary.

I had a few acupuncture sessions, and I stopped my treatment without really making a decision to – after missing one appointment, my lack of time and money (as I was preparing to move to NYC) suddenly seemed very apparent. I wasn’t quite sure if the acupuncture was helping what I was wanting it to help (while I’m in confessional mode: some stomach problems, a too-often runny nose, general unwellness), but I did feel great afterwards: I was exceptionally relaxed and calm for the rest of the day, at least. And during the procedure my mind felt clear and focused – which finally brings me to the beginnings of this project. What struck me most, while lying on my back staring at the ceiling, was just how abstract, almost metaphorical the whole process was – I hadn’t been given (or really been expecting) a full explanation of what was happening to me and how it was going to work. In fact, I couldn’t even really tilt my head comfortably enough to see the size of the needles I was being poked with. My body image (both internal and external) was pretty much the product of my mind, with the odd physical sensation (pulsing, tingling) acting as a sort of clue. I wanted, someday, to visually articulate what I felt was happening to me, and explore the disconnect (or connect!) between, I suppose, the knowable and the unknowable.

It resurfaced as a concept for both an ICM and physical computing project a couple weeks ago, at the intersection of numerous ideas. In my “Mapping Narratives” class, I’ve been thinking a lot about some kind of data visualization – or map – of bodily image or process. This begun as an ICM midterm looking at ‘phrenology’ – the pseudo-science that posits the brain as a collection of localized regions – but now I see the opportunity to collect all these threads into one project, involving acupuncture.

ICM Midterm: Digital Phrenology

Partially inspired by the “Mapping Narratives” class I’m taking (and my accompanying nascent interest in data visualization), I wanted my midterm to function as a rendering of the ‘emotional balance’ of a computer user. As Joseph pointed out in last week’s class, this endeavor is linked to the 19th century practice of “phrenology”, a practice that claimed to be able to derive character and personality traits from a study of the shape of the head. This (pseudo-)science promoted the notion that “certain brain areas have localized, specific functions”.

What interested me in this concept was the element of experiential truth beyond the now-transparently silly biological claims – we still rather rigorously attempt to categorize and contain the multiple areas of our life, perhaps especially so when we talk of ourselves as computer users (“this is my work computer”). I thought it would be valuable to graphically display this process of self-fragmentation – my first step was a simple reworking of the ‘ascii mirror’ example to include text sourced from an outside file. Each line of text would equate to a row of pixels, and if certain words were found (“work”, “busy”, “love”, “funny”), the size of the text would increase, effectively increasing the image resolution. The end result would be an electronic portrait, wherein the interests and preoccupations of the user shape the image.

Pong!

You’ll find a simple, non-score-enabled, herky-jerky Pong prototype, made my myself and Jose, viewable (with source code) here.

Cautious beginnings…

I am tinkering. Lights are flashing. Rectangles are being formed. I need more sleep than I’m getting.

Stuff to follow.