January 31

With the project “The Malbody Centre” Marije Baalman is investigating how body protheses may mediate our senses in a speculative futuristic setting, a further development of wearables into so-called e-bodilies. The project will eventually be presented as a multiparticipant environment, where participants will each take on the role of a malbody, a person with e-bodilies not functioning according to the norm and cast out of society. The project takes a critical stance at body based sensing (the body as the last frontier between privacy and big data), the control of artificial intelligence over our experience of the world (what if not only our news sources are controlled by this, but also our bodily experiences?) and how our society deals with people who divert from the norm (diversity in terms of ability and body). Of our senses, touch is perhaps the one most directly connected to our emotional state and being. Touching someone else can be an expression of intimacy, affection, giving comfort to a violation of privacy or integrity, its interpretation depending on social and personal context. Mediating touch through technologies can (perhaps) be achieved with sensors and haptic feedback devices. During the presentation Marije Baalman will present her first theoretical and practical investigations for developing a speculative prothesis for mediating touch.

Marije Baalman (based in Amsterdam) is a freelance artist and researcher/developer working in the field of interactive sound art and working in between art & technology. She has a diverse background in Applied Physics, Acoustics, Electronic Music, Computation Arts and Interactive Technologies, and has studied and researched at the TU Delft, TU Berlin, and Concordia University (Montréal), and has worked at STEIM. She is a member of the Instrument Inventors Initiative (iii) in The Hague. Her work goes into the use of wireless sensor networks for live performance (such as dance and music), installations and interactive environments, and code and algorithms to generate patterns and behaviours in realtime. Her current focus is on creating multi-participant interactive environments. https://marijebaalman.eu