Machine Therapy

I mentioned the work of Kelly Dobson about a year ago. Today, I attended her VERY inspiring thesis defense at the Media Lab, researching on Machine Therapy. I love her personal relationship to machines. I cannot wait to read her thesis!


Abstract
In this thesis I describe a new body of work called Machine Therapy, a methodology for revealing the vital relevance of subconscious elements of human-machine interactions that works within art, design, psychodynamics, and engineering. This practice highlights what machines actually do and mean, in contrast to what their designers consciously intended. Machine Therapy is a cyclical process that alternates between discussion of and sessions for empathic relationships with domestic appliances, personal extension and connection via wearable and prosthetic apparatuses, and the design of evocative visceral robots that interact with people's understandings of themselves and each other. Combining research and practice in digital signal processing and machine learning, mechanical engineering, and textile sensor design, I have been able to create new objects and relationships that are unique in some aspects while maintaining quotidian familiarity in other aspects. This is illustrated through the documented construction of several projects including re-appropriated domestic devices, wearable apparatuses, and machines that act in relation with users’ autonomic signals. These Machine Therapy devices are evaluated in studies of participants' interactive engagements with the machines as well as participants' affective responses to the machines. The Machine Therapy projects facilitate unusual explorations of the parapraxis of machine design and use: these usually unconscious elements of our interactions with machines critically affect our sense of self, agency in the social and political world, and shared emotional, cultural, and perceptual development.


Dissertation Committee

Christopher Csikszentmihályi
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Muriel Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory


Rosalind W. Picard
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Laboratory


Edith Ackermann, PhD
Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology
University of Aix-Marseille I, France
Visiting Scientist, MIT School of Architecture

Kelly's Web site
Computing Culture research group

Music performance: water walk

In 1960 John Cage appears in a popular TV show and performs the music piece water walk. He uses sounds of everyday objects to compose. His carefulness and very precise actions show that he must have rehearsed hundred of times to perform his piece. Via multimedialab.

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Recently, Nicholas Knouf created an interactive version of John Cage's graphical score Variations 2, called Variations 10b. I tried it during an exhibition at the Lewis Music Library at MIT and found the interface very convincing. The interface allows a performer to change the score and get immediate feedback as to the result. Nicholas hopes that both listeners and performers will develop a more nuanced understanding of the score through the use of the interface.

Paper on variations 10b.


Three dots activated in a performance

What's next with social networks?

I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

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Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.

Almost Safe

Deconstruction, 2007; Low Tide, 2007 by Anthony Goicolea

In his new show "Almost Safe," photographer Anthony Goicolea presents digitally-composed, black-and-white images of a shattered earth. The artist portrays a world that bears the wounds of globalization, war, and a crippled environment. Only these wastelands are left in their wake. Goicolea has composited images taken at several disaster sites, adding elements (like power lines across an ocean rock formation) that seem out-of-place or just barely plausible. In Deconstruction, ominous dark clouds form over an office building that's been halved in two and thrown across a beach. In Black Ice, a car is shown leaving a post-apocalyptic cityscape that's maybe part-New York City and part-Oz. This world is only half-real, but the more you look at Goicolea's constructions, the less impossible they seem. - Christopher Bartley

"Almost Safe" opens April 28 and runs through June 2, 2007 at Postmasters Gallery, NYC.
More info

Via V magazine

We Will Become Silhouettes

Created by Elena Corchero, we will become silhouettes is a collection of fashion accesories that explores delicate ways of incorporating organic solar cells into textiles in which technology meets tradition. The pieces are charged while used outdoors during the day. When brought indoors in the evening they transform into a decorative ambient light display for the home, powered only by energy stored earlier.
Electronic components like solar cells, resistors, and LEDs are integrated directly into the textile and wired together into working circuits using conductive thread. Organic prints and embroidery motifs recall endangered birds.

Enabling musical expression

Rachel's graphical representation of Dan's musical composition

During the H2.0 event, Adam Boulanger, researcher at the Hyperinstruments group with Professor Tod Machover presented their most impressive latest research: enabling musical expression.
Dan Ellsey, who has cerebral palsy, has been composing with the Hyperscore environment for almost two years. Adam developed a head-set and supporting software so that Dan could expressively perform his hyperscore compositions as a soloist. Dan worked closely with the team to perform his “eagle song” using head movements during the event. Rachel Roppolo worked on translating the sensor inputs from Dan into minimal graphics. Zach Watts worked on the curve algorithm to determine the type of shape Dan was making.
The performance was clearly impressive, very detailed and empowered the public.

I later talked to Adam about the project. He explained that the project necessitated a number of important steps. The team initially built on the commercial head tracker that Dan usually uses. However the commercial tracker was unsuccessful for a performance because it is not fast enough and is not reporting continuous data. Adam had to create a continuous head tracker.
Regarding the design aspects of the system, Adam had to work closely with Dan to come up with the algorithm that he needed to get clean data from Dan’s head movements, the team later calibrated the sensors for Dan.
The other step consisted in designing a controller that could run a performance. The team designed a new software that could take Dan’s range of motions and velocity of movement. They also had to do curve analysis to determine the type of shape Dan was making. Adam had to also figure out, based on his piece and movement, how this would be represented as an expression of the piece. The whole process was a discussion back and forth between Dan and the team. The system being done, they went through the piece of music and defined the type of movement needed for expression.

The performance was incredible. I cried, impressed by what the team had achieved.
The speakers were all impressive, I missed a few of them that I have to catch up on the archive. The webcast of the event is available online.


Adam, Dan and Tod

Inspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
—Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

The first chapter can be downloaded here

A living sculpture

Aimée Mullins

Today at the fantastic H2.0 event hosted by John Hockenberry and organized by the MIT Media Laboratory, key speakers presented new research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability and this to vastly improve the quality of human life.


Pictures from Aimee Mullins's talk

I discovered the inspiring work of Aimée Mullins, that not only is functional but also beautiful. She raises questions on identity and the body, on what it means to loose her lower self. She worked with various artists, designers and modeled for Alexander Mc Queen.


Aimée Mullins, Dazed & Confused, September 1998 by photographer Nick Knight

In Cremaster 3, actress Aimée Mullins wears blades on the soles of her shoes or a white dress and transparent crystal legs.


Cremaster 3

At the end of the H2.0 event Aimée Mullins declared: "people say i have no legs, but I have ten pairs of them and my interaction with them allow me to be a living sculpture"


Aimée' Sculptural legs, photographer: Webb Chappell


Model: Aimée Mullins, photographer: Chris Winget

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Wearable robotic

Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- Hugh Herr, director of the bio mechatronics group, presented his latest research. I am impressed by his work and fascinated by his own prostheses. He presented the number of persons who could benefit from wearable robotic and wearable attached to the body. From veterans who have parts of their body amputated, to anyone who could be robotically augmented. For instance, with wearable robotic, anyone could wear 100kg in a bag pack and not feel the load because it would be transmitted to the robot.

In Hugh Herr’s research, living muscle tissues are stimulated electrically to get the desired motion response. He presented the motion by mechanics in prostheses developed by the mechatronics group at the MIT media laboratory. The Rheo knee prosthesis allows to reduce the energy consumed in walking, allows to walk downstairs, upstairs, faster and slower. The person who wears the prostheses is controlling the lift. This research is based on nature, on how nature functions and steals from nature for its design.

Hugh Herr’s goal for the next years is to build the first hybrid body or limb by attaching robotic limb to the skeleton, load being transferred to the tissue. One of the main challenges is for the body to create its own seal. The group will develop the next generation of legs, and neurocontrol strategies for a direct control on these prostheses. Hugh Herr mentioned that his group developed the most powerful ankle in the world.

For the Human 2.0 event, John Maeda composed of 24 scribbled personas. I still have not chosen the one I am ...

Social affective touch for robots

My past research on psychohaptics and taptap at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory, involved studying the perception of touch, and how people relate affectively to haptic sensations. Today, Dr Cynthia Breazeal who leads the Robotic Life research group at the MIT Media Laboratory addressed the question of social affective touch. Her main theme is to build cooperative machines that work and learn in partnership with people.
Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- she presented her latest research including the robotic companion. The robotic life group explores social affective touch and develops machine learning algorithms to categorize various sense of touch, from pleasant to annoying ones. Exploring the sense of touch and interpretation of touch by robots is a new area of research.
The robot is designed in the form of a bear, the bear being a universal symbol of comfort. The robot itself is covered of silicone skin to not feel like a machine when hugged. In their first experiments, the robot had local intelligence, local sensing and response, coordination. An operator could communicate with the bear to a 3d bear model on a screen.

Applications behind this work could be for family members to be able to play from everywhere, to bridge the usual generation gap between grandparents and grandchildren, to allow people to remain in contact while separated. This is especially important when a child is spending a day at the hospital alone and what it means for the parents to be able to stay with the child remotely.
Another high vision for this work is to allow collaborative partnership using a remote tutor. Cynthia mentioned that eventually the bear could be highly trained and could offer high quality education to the ones who usually are not exposed to such education.