Category Archives: Performance

Popularity Prosthetics: Retweet Popularity Monitor for Face-to-Face Conversation

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Designed as a critique of status monitoring in online contexts, this project presents a prototype of a prosthetic device that conversation partners wear in their mouths to provide visual and auditory feedback about the speaker’s level of online popularity (measured in retweets). The speaker with more current retweets experiences voice amplification (and their mouth glows a clear blue) while the less popular interlocutor gets quieter and their mouth glows red. The design aims to call attention to problematic features of the “marketplace of attention” that structures the amplification of “speech” in online contexts. In this way, I deliberately designed the objects to frustrate communication by awkwardly interjecting online status into meat-space.

Special thanks to Laila Shereen Sakr and Rosemary Comella for helping me to demo this project.

Traffic Massage Chair

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(2010) Collaboration with Michael Annetta.

This design uses XML data from NAVTEQ to translate daily traffic flow at particular road sections into a rhythmic pulses that maps onto PWM voltage for vibrating motors.

By the year 2060, all the humans who survived peak-oil live in giant honeycomb-like structures that contain self-sustaining mini-ecologies within each geodesic cell. Movement is tightly regulated, but residences are efficiently distributed such that all experiences of landscape are consistent.

There is no open space nor closed space; there is only space. Each individual residence is the same size and the same distance from every other. Experiences of proximity to other human beings are thus normalized, and travel is coordinated by cloud-based supercomputers, so that one never encounters more or less than the same number of people at any given time.

But ironically, years after peak oil, people start to nostalgicize the era of the automobile. Entranced by the tragic romance of our (once-upon-a-time) collective disregard for the future, consumers look at the car as a kind of thematic palette for restaurants, parties, films, etc. In this sense, the era of automobile is experienced the way we think of pirates, the 50s, or the Wild West today.
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Secrets for Senators

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Set in the context of telecom immunity debates of 2007 and 2008, Secrets for Senators is a performative intervention in which intimate secrets are confessed over the phone to senators who support warrantless wiretapping. This work considers the current threat of pervasive surveillance and illegal spying as a kind of psychic violence inflicted by the state. Secrets for Senators aims to subvert this violence by repositioning the violation of privacy as a deliberate and empowering act of self-exposure. I am interested in amplifying an awkward juxtaposition between private and public voices. In the video above callers leave answering machine messages sympathizing with the government’s need for secrets about its citizenry, and then, in an elaborate quid pro quo, proceed to divulge intimate secrets in exchange for the senator’s opposition to retroactive immunity. In other examples (not shown here), I spoke live to staffers while taking on an aggressive anti-privacy persona in order to co-opt the narrative that those who complain about surveillance must have “something” to hide.