Been very active on the SYS facebook

Hi See Yourself Sensing friends,
Come and visit my SYS facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/See-Yourself-Sensing/184369981612805
I'm using it as a research site, posting things like Jaime Pitarch's Chernobyl - a toy that speaks of sensory conditions as much as any interactive work.

Edgar Orlaineta's work, including play on Eames and more

Some fun stuff about sound

Here's my new post on Huffington:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline-schwartzman/in-search-of-lost-sound-m_b_1563845.html?utm_hp_ref=science

The videos are all incredible. Now I can't stop saying "Ba-rom-e-ter, ba-rom-e-ter." You'll see. The video about the Northern Lights makes me feel like I'm camping.

Hope you'll follow my posts.

SYS in Science Times China

Science Times China wrote did an interview about See Yourself Sensing. Here's the cover page, a still from a really strange and beautiful video by Hillerbrand and Magsamen. Do you see any of your kids' toys in that giant pile of plastic. I chuckled when China, capital of plastic, chose this for the cover of the article. Having trouble keeping up w/ Huffington Post posts, facebook, blogger and tumblr. Stay tuned for new Huffington Post article - interesting one on sound.

Huffington Post number 2

Harness Up That Snail and Let's Make Energy: It's Time to Feed the Table

Here's my new post for Huffington. I saw Auger and Loizeau's incredible fly and mice eating robots in London while I was working on See Yourself Sensing. I thought that they were brilliant, but I couldn't see them as immediately relating to the body and the senses. Auger and Loizeau produce some of the most intelligent work around. Pictured here is their Flypaper Robotic Clock, a self-sustaining robot. That fly is about to get scraped into the microbial fuel cell. And they call Damien Hurst's piece at the Tate Modern a "cycle"? His cow head, flies and zapper produce a rotting waste of biomass. According to Bristol Robotics, 8 dead flies powers a microbial fuel cell for 12 days

I'm blogging for Huffington Post, science section

It all happened very quickly. Met with David Freeman and Neil Katz of HP last friday and the post is up already. I'm going to write about crazy people and projects I love. The most time consuming thing: figuring out how to post to Facebook, Tumblr and Blogger... and parenting.

Here's the article:

Put on a Happy Face (Or If You Can't, Use Electricity) 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline-schwartzman/put-on-a-happy-face_b_1438114.html

Images below: left is from Duchenne de Boulogne's monograph Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine. This is the toothless old man I wrote about. He's being exposed to electrical stimulation to the face to reveal a particular nerve / muscle combination for a particular human emotion.

Right: Daito Manabe and collaborators: Face Visualizer

My MIT lecture + book offer and review in Yale Constructs

Here's a link to my lecture at MIT's Design and Computation group:
http://cronpodcast.mit.edu:8171/podcastproducer/attachments/02DCB521-2BB9-40D2-9F5F-ED03D0EB06B4/61234336-B125-4689-91D9-98201E686774.m4v

I'm starting to put back into the talk many of the images that couldn't fit into the book or were cut. In the process I'm imagining a whole new book and arrangement. My argument is that the senses are unreliable and don't work the way we think they do. It makes sense, then, that I would keep imagining a different book.

Black Dog Publishing has asked me to repost their blog reader discount. Feel free to repost or tell a friend:
Buy the book at 40% off (27 dollars):
send Email to:

jess@blackdogonline.com
Subject: sys offer
Include your address

SYS review in Yale Constructs: March 2012

Heading up to Boston area on Thursday for the MIT lecture. Very happy about this, since various characters in the book are MIT people: Mark Goulthorpe, Michael Rakowitz, Steve Mann and more. Anyone in the area, come say hello.

My plane hits a bus on the way to book talk

This happened in Detroit on the way to Erie, PA. My plane's wing tipped over the bus. No one was hurt. The best kind of plane crash. Had a fun time at Edinboro University, where Kim Todd (Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis ) and I gave lectures at event organized by artist Lisa Austin. On to MIT March 16th.

Upcoming Lectures:

If you're around, come see these talks on the book, with video and new images of projects:

March 5th 

Edinboro University

Van Houten South Dining Hall

1:30

March 16th, 

MIT Design & Computation Group Lecture Series

Long Lounge / AVT Building 7 room 431 MIT

12:30-2:00

April 12th

Horace Man School

Book Day

2pm

Has Anyone seen the Doug Wheeler exhibition at David Zwirner?

Review on Abler blog

Here's a fascinating blog and a thoughtful review of SYS.
http://www.ablersite.org/2012/01/see-yourself-sensing/
quotes from the book and images of Cocky Eek and Sitraka Rakotoniana

See Yourself Sensing #1 on Top ten holiday books: Azure Magazine

http://azuremagazine.com/newsviews/blog_content.php?id=1954
also: Publisher SYS offer: 40% off
email: jess@blackdogonline.com
subject: SYS Offer
leave your address

Big article on See Yourself Sensing in Barnard Magazine

Apollinaire Scherr writes about dance and art.  She managed to turn a sprawling interview (with non-linear me) into a nice summary of my teaching and its relationship to the book (or vice versa).
Here it is:
http://barnard.edu/headlines/salon-what-we-percieve

Erik Hobijn at STRP Festival, Netherlands, this November

One of my favorite works in SYS - Erik Hobijn's Delusions of Self Immolation - is at the STRP Festival EXPO's  Dutch media and technological art retrospective (this November).

It works like this: you lube up with a flame-resistent gel, then you're set on fire for 1/4 to 1/2 second by a blast from a flame-thrower.
In the nick of time the lazy susan you're standing on flips you around and you're extinguished. 
Dark, precise, conceptual, brilliant.

Bottom photos of Martin Hartz Kaplers on the DSI by Viola Pfaff and Peter Wirth

Book review in Azure Magazine

http://www.azuremagazine.com/magazine/bookreviews.php
november / december 2011

Why Daito Manabe is so See Yourself Sensing

Daito (and numerous collaborators) posts semi-crude videos of himself before the monitor, experimenting with things like face tracking ("Face Tracker: Jason Saragih"), electrical stimulation and LED'S.  He lets us in on the experimentation - he sees himself and later we see him seeing himself.  He's also generous with his work. Click on these videos:

face projection test -02 (Daito Manabe with Zachary Lieberman) 

electric stimulus to face -test3 ( Daito Manabe )

led in my mouth -test3 (Daito Manabe + Motoi Ishibashi)

See Yourself Sensing on Zoe Ryan's (curator and chair of Architectue and Design, Art Institute of Chicago) "must read" list

You never know what googling your own book will turn up!  Just found this very nice plug for See Yourself Sensing. Here's an excerpt from Designers and Books blog article: A Tool for Understanding Our Relationship with the World Around Us: Books Every Product Designer Should Read—Zoë Ryan
http://www.designersandbooks.com/blog/tool-understanding-our-relationship-world-around-us-books-every-product-designer-should-read%E2%80%94zo

"While there are more than enough books here to keep designers busy for a long time, we asked Ryan if there are any newly published books that would make it onto her “must read” list. Her recommendation? See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception by Madeline Schwartzman (Black Dog Publishing, August 2011). Ryan says,

'For a number of years I have been researching and thinking about an exhibition related to design and the senses; one that not only addresses the visual and physical sensation of touching and using design but also contemplates other issues connected to how we relate to design through smell, sound, and taste.

This book is a great overview of art, design, and architecture projects that promote new sensory experiences and foster awareness of how we perceive and experience the world.'"

Kei Kagami at Steinbeisser, Amsterdam

 

I had wanted to include more of Kagami's work in See Yourself Sensing.  Here are some images of his beautifully awkward clothes and shoes.  If you're in Amsterdam, go see his 10 year shoe retrospective at Steinbeisser: 

http://www.steinbeisser.org/2011/10/exhibition-kei-kagami-opening-5-november/

Sensor in a pill

Turned out that my airplane neighbor on the way to the London book launch was the CTO of IBM North East Europe - Rashik Parmar - a smart guy who was talks 'See Yourself Sensing' better than I do.  Among other things, he told me about some upcoming sensors, including a pill with a microchip on it - gets activated by stomach acid and transmits to an external receiver. 
http://singularityhub.com/2009/06/08/proteus-ingestible-microchip-hits-clinical-trials/

Only problem - remote caregivers will need a microchip to remind them to monitor the pill-use uploads.