Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, my favorite artist engineer, came to our lab to share with us her latest research. I had the chance to work closely with her in Ireland for the Save the Robots summer exhibition so I was already familiar with her past work. She presented her new work, the health clinic, a clinic to which you can go to discuss your environmental health concerns.
Natalie with her robot-talkative duck
The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.
The clinic works like this. You make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.
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Blog Jouons 
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Environmental Health Clinic
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Costumes for Domestic Oppositional Training
atHABITAT: Costumes for Domestic Oppositional Training, 2007
Kate James focuses on interests of the body, it’s habits, movements, and dynamic sectional relationship to it’s surrounding structures. She hopes to question and complicate the interfaces between the corporeal and the environmental — those objects, surfaces, and systems that mediate the body’s experience within an environment and fuel the habitual kinesthesia of everyday life.
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Blog Jouons
Friday, March 07, 2008
A village on the ice
Antarctic Village by Orta Studio is a symbol of the plight of those struggling to transverse borders and to gain the freedom of movement necessary to escape political and social conflict.
Dotted along the ice, the tents formed a settlement reminiscent of the images of refugee camps we see so often reported about on our television screens and newspapers. Physically the installation Antarctic Village is emblematic of Ortas’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. More on Orta's web site.
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Blog Jouons
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
An Environment for the Prosthetic Body
Hybrid Architecture: An Environment for the Prosthetic Body by Georges Teyssot The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 11, No. 4, 72-84 (2005)
Drawing from philosophical, literary, artistic and technological sources, this text focuses on the theoretical relations between body and environment. It illustrates the argument by probing into various topics such as: desiring machines, body without organs, organs without body, gymnastic implements, body-building, celibate machines, incorporation, disembodiment, androids, robots, cyborgs, electro-mechanical and electronic apparatuses, spacesuits, wearable computers and augmented reality, the eco-technical spheres and the matrix. In addition, it looks into theories of medical devices that help explain the notion of the prosthetic body. Finally, within the context of theories of tools and cyber-organism, it attempts to rethink design through the terms of contemporary practices of daily life.
Zombie Kit V1, 2007 by Brian Walker
See also the Prosthetic Impulse
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