Megafone.net has developed thirteen projects with different communities: Taxi drivers from Mexico City 2004, young gypsies in Lleida and León (Spain 2005), prostitutes in Madrid 2005, Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica 2006, motorcycle messengers (motoboys) in Sao Paolo 2007, displaced and demobilized people in Colombia 2009, young Sahrawi refugees in the Algerian Sahara 2009 and immigrants in Queens, New York 2011.

Three projects were developed with people with limited mobility in Barcelona 2006, Geneva 2008 and Montreal 2012, and another one in Barcelona 2010 with blind and visually impaired participants. In these projects, participants take photographs with GPS mobile phones to document the barriers that they encounter in the streets, as well as examples of good accessibility. These photos are geo-located on maps that are populated with their user-generated content. Obstacles are identified by tags which represent the themes that the participants have identified as most significant. The Megafone.net project visualizes the patterns of systemic discrimination against people with disabilities and physical impairments that have become rooted in the urban landscape. It denounces this lack of access and challenges political indifference to this vital issue.

Decelerator Helmet

Decelerator Helmet is an artistic project that offers an experimental approach to an essential subject of our globalized world. The technical reproducible senses are consigned to an apparatus which allows the user a perception of the world in slow motion. The float of time as apparently invariant constant is broken and subjected under the user’s control. The idea to decouple the personal perception from the natural timing enables the user to become aware of his own time.

In the inside of the helmet the Video-signal of a camera is processed by a small computer. The slowed down images are displayed right before the user’s eyes via a Head-Mounted Display and simultaneously shown at a monitor on the outside. In three different modes the lapse of time can be influenced through a remote control:

In the auto-mode time is slowed down automatically and re-accelerated after a defined interval. The press-mode allows the specific deceleration of time and in the scroll-mode the user can completely control the speed of the elapsing of time.

The idea to decouple the personal perception from the natural timing enables the user to become aware of his own relationship to time. The helmet works as a reflection-bubble to think about the flow of time in general and the relation between sensory perception, environment and corporality in particular.

The technique of the Decelerator extends the awareness of time and transforms the concept of present in a constructed, artificial state. On a different level the helmet dramatically visualizes how slowing down under all circumstances causes a loss of actuality and as idea is inconsistent with its environment. It raises the general question how technology will shape our senses in the future, how this shift to a personalized perception could change our view of the world and eventually will lead to an detachment of our global convention of reality.

The term prosthetics indicates an addition or extension. The word “prosthetics” was included in medical terminology in the 16th Century. Three centuries later, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his seminal book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man first published in 1964: Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. McLuhan also argued that ‘any medium whatever is an extension, a projection in space or in time, of our various senses. He postulated that while earlier technologies extended one part of the body (for instance the wheel extending the foot), the new electronic technologies extended the whole nervous system.

In an increasingly technologically mediated world the issue of what constitutes a prosthetics becomes crucial. It is important to note the evolving trans-disciplinary role of the artist in the design process and techniques, the process of innovation, scientific visualization and the process of developing and disseminating a prosthetic. The question remains: If designers, scientists and engineers are limited by a focus on restoring function, how can those who rely on prostheses benefit from advances in artificial intelligence, materials science, nanotechnology and other emerging discoveries? Rapidly emerging engineering technology and advanced materials have revolutionized prosthetics developments over the last decades. The most advanced apparatus can respond to instructions from the central nervous system, therefore these neural controlled devices are anticipated to forecast the future progress of prosthetics.

The presentation will briefly examine some of the issues related to prosthetics, such as history, material developments, ethical concerns, biological and evolutionary aspects, sports related issues and approaches by artists.

There are many ways to turn movement into music; indeed most musical instruments do just that. There is, however, another way to approach to the same basic idea, one which is not so much concerned with the deliberate control of defined sound parameters (i.e. musical instruments), but which is instead concerned with stimulating the basic instincts that belong to both music and dance. By offering the user parameters that are obviously under their complete control, combined with others that are heavily subsidized (using “assistance” techniques such as algorithmic composition and rhythmic quantization), it is possible to design interactive environments that seem intuitive, i.e. not based on the user’s understanding, but on their instincts. This stimulates movement, social interaction and healthy proprioception which is of particular importance in the treatment of pathologies, including cerebral palsy, aphasia, autism, quadriplegia, blindness, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Spider silk thread is relatively much stronger than steel and can even be made by a living being. Woven it would be capable to resist the impact of a bullet, much like a bee on the spider’s web. If human skin would be able to produce this thread, would we be protected from bullets? Together with the Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands Jalila Essaïdi takes the acid test: by implanting transgenic spider silk in the human skin and letting a bullet do its work.

By implementing this bulletproof matrix of spider silk produced by transgenic goats in human skin Essaïdi wants to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety in a world with access to new biotechnologies. Issues which arise on the basis of ancient human desire for invulnerability. It is legend that Achilles, the central character of Homer’s Iliad was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. Will we in the near future due to biotechnology no longer need to descend from a godly bloodline in order to have traits like invulnerability?

With this work Jalila Essaïdi wants to show that safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof. The work did stop some partially slowed bullets but not the one at full speed. But even with the skin pierced by the bullet the experiment is still a success. It leads to the conversation about how which form of safety would benefit society.

2.6g 329m/s is made possible through the Designers & Artist 4 Genomics Awards and partly through sponsorship from Fisher Scientific. The project suggests interesting materials research that goes beyond the expertise of the Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands and which utilises expertise of the Utah State University, Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands Forensic Institute and other Dutch institutions.