This semesters assignment is to imagine, design and fabricate a wearable apparatus that either inhibits, exaggerates, or enhances the body.

Machines to exposed the unseen In present day architectural discourse, the mouse, the keyboard, hardware and software have become the main tools in the design process. These tools guide us in conscious and unconscious ways, influencing our way of working and thinking, therefore our design. In recent years, technological developments have started to close the gap between digital design and its realisation. For example, kinematic systems like robots and 3d printers have become an intrinsic part of materialising digital and parametric ideas in architecture, making the fabrication of this shapes easier. Nevertheless, becoming a constraint, the geometry you input is the geometry to get. 

Artist, designers, architects have used body extensions and technology to expose specific human qualities or to explore the expansion of the human body past it limits. 

Body Extension Create a work that exists as a “body extension,” a sculptural/architectural/corporeal supplement. Use your own body as a starting point for an exploration of the self, including psychological and physical aspects and concepts of identity. The second part of the assignment asks you to interact with your body extension in a way that significantly alters your experience of it.  Look for an inner emotional, physical or sensory process. Do not explain what you know about it, but what you experience, do not use language.

Readings: Horn, Rebecca and Celant, Germano, “The Bastille Interviews.” Rebecca Horn, 1993 Linker, Kate, “On Language and Its Ruses: Poetry into Performance.” Vito Acconci, 1994 Pejic, Bojana, “Being-in-the-Body, On the Spiritual in Marina Abramovic’s Art.” Abramovic, 1993,  McLuhan “The medium is the Massage” 1967 and “understanding Media”1966