Living With Your Own Ideas
Last updated
Last updated
What if our perception of time could be intrinsically related to life’s path?
The first prosthesis guided by the phrase “be the best version of yourself” intrinsically directs us to ask and reflect on what part of our body is not being truly accepted, or could be improved to envision and improve our image. However, choosing a specific flaw, something that we truly don’t take can be quite tricky, it’s about knowing yourself and understanding what are you not satisfied it.
In the first steps, I couldn’t think about something specifically related to my physical body, something that kept affecting me repeatedly to imagine and wonder what life would be if I could change this form, size, or any kind of physical intervention. As a consequence, my answer got directly to my habits, my behaviors, and how they actually could be improved using something above my body.
From digital device addiction to concentration and focus issues, a word keeps everything attached, together as an enmeshed consequence of destiny, considering our fast-paced pace accelerated way of living in the contemporary, time. Time is the currency of our lives and with more distractions within an interconnected reality, our attention is worth any penny to keep ourselves present and not more necessarily anxious about what we are missing.
The prosthesis acts as a living clock, a living being that can be attached to any part of your body to break the boundaries and standards of ways of perceiving time through numbers in a cycle loop of 24 hours by the life cycle. After attaching to your body, the living creature will stay there and will slowly die along the day to reflect the perception and importance of how we use time by looking at life in a different way, another vision.
The creature’s lifetimes span around a day, but it’s not 100% certain, considering the different kinds of circumstances and contexts that can extend or compress its life cycle, such as time relativity. It’s important to emphasize that the prosthesis isn’t supposed to be reused or revived, and every 24 hours the users have to attach a new one each day, an interaction directrix that guides the user to reflect and compare its lifetime to the creature in which you are establishing the connection with.
What if we could reframe the relations of our body with insects and bugs?
At first sight, the phrase “be something else” makes us imagine more possibilities, as different kinds of entities and creatures, or even not living beings that make us explore how our reality would be if we could be in another body. This question reveals a deep desire to embody something as else, to be another thing and as a consequence, to create empathy through the reality you are subjected to.
Thinking about ecological relations and how they could translate into different objects to create this parallel reality, makes us think about what we can consider ourselves. What is a human, and how does our body relate to the things that surround us considering our distorted vision of reality that culturally implies a perfect creation of nature and evolution? What could change this anthropocentric vision of the world?
As a consequence of these questions, mutualism was the choice to understand and decentralize ourselves from the middle of everything, to know in a new scale what we are exchanging with the environment around us and how this relation could be more explicit, reconsidering the micro relations that are almost invisible to our eyes. Then, creating something that could transform our bodies into something else to perceive this connection would be the answer to the initial phrase, an improvement of our evolution.
The result of the process is a MakeUp set, a joint of objects that could improve the body relations skills to exchange and incorporate different interactions with small creatures as insects, like a bug hotel. The set proposes two different modules one specifically related to sheltering creatures with different wholes that work as the entries for the structure and the second one is a module dedicated to feeding this creature, but adding water and even small plants to your body.
In the end, these speculative ideas make us imagine how it would be reframed by this little creature that could live with you within a prosthesis that became a part of you and an evolution of what you’d become as a human. Maybe some insects could establish themselves forever within you or maybe use your body as a system of transportation to certain areas of their interest.
What if we could collect DNA from the world around us?
The final prosthesis becomes guided by the phrase “being judge and judge” which makes a different relation to the possible ecological relations that it could connect considering its intrinsic relation to the social meaning of the objects that are being used and how in our society that are being perceived through the interactions we have with the people around us. However, considering our long story by taking things inconsequentially, what would be a world if we took things from ourselves, what’s measure and balance to affect someone?
The ecological relation explored at this time was commensalism, where different species of animals relate to each other, taking advantage of something but not exactly negatively affecting the existence of the other. Something that for humans can have different meanings considering our individuality, our aims, and ambitions that change the perception of what is allowed.
The prosthesis developed acts like a kangaroo pouch, a space reserved to collect things from space and store them in individual capsules containing water or humidity inside. The objective of the structure is to catch genetic material from random people by perceived objects and marks that are being left behind without people knowing, something that as commensalism, doesn’t affect us the species “directly”.
When using the prototype is incredible to perceive the quantity of how much genetic material people leave in the streets, workstations, and even trash, a place with the intention to discard stuff. By collecting cigarettes, chiclets, wet wipes, and even the lipstick prints in someone’s bottle of water or cup, we as humans don’t feel watched and judged by the things we are used to discard, as an invisible footprint that no one misses.
At last, the prosthesis tries carefully around its compartments to isolate genetic material from the rest of the world to maintain its properties and indicate the owner of the specific materials that are been collected. A project that reflects how much we are left behind until a time in the future arises reframing the importance of caring about our DNA and how the relation with simple things can change from a commensalism relation to a parasite one in the near tomorrow.
As a consequence of intense days of reflection and fast systematic responses to the briefings given by the class, my experience in the class guided me through certain kinds of questions about what a prosthesis is, considering that every tool we develop is an extension of our body that implies a certain reaction and consequence in our physical and external environment. However, considering the Britannica definition as something that replaces a part of the body or something that improves it, I imagine that the blurry lines that define prosthesis depend on how the tool is conceptualized/created and the intimate relation to the body, as a different level of intimacy. Maybe? Prostheses are tools, but not all of them are necessarily implants, some of them are inside, some are between us and the external and some are only projected outside.
With developed projects and the reflections made along the experimentation process, it was important to understand the intimacy between the body and how our perception changes when different living beings split space with our existence by changing the scale of our perception with them and how we direct our attention. As a consequence, I could reflect and focus on a process of care, where my attention was guided to understanding how those prostheses would work speculatively, and how they were relating to me as I related to them in an interspecies ecological relation that I was more aware of. In the end, the social and cultural meanings of the two first prostheses were related to the consequences of how people perceived the ideas, considering they weren't so distant from reality. However, the third project had a more social impact because people understand emerging technologies and how they could affect us tomorrow, not necessarily something they relate to certain species that act as collectors, as normal behavior between certain species.
