We are all familiar with the Dark Side of the love tokens. The cultural history is full of tales of the chastity belts and keys from the tower that been worn into battle. Jordan Rozansky and David Odio created an excellent spoof that brings this into a 21st century. What you see here is a joke, but there is a warning in it: when looking for your 21st century accessories (be it your latest fitness gadget or a present from dearest and nearest), it is worth to conciser who is in control.
Far from being an invention of the twenty first century, technological wearables devices have been a part of our cultural heritage for almost five hundred years. This a precursor of a wrist watch as an earliest known dated watch. It was made in 1530 for a humanist Philipp Melanchthon by an unknown German artisan. It is thought to originate in Augsburg, and currently resigns in the collection of The Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore Maryland. And whats particular remarkable: this beautifully crafted technological marvel is still capable of keeping time.
One of the Modern Keepsakes, called The Distant Heart will be featured at the V&A's Digital Design Weekend as a part of the London Design Festival.
The Distant Heart is a computational necklace, developed as a part of the research into rectifying the emotional void created when families, friends and loved ones move away from each other. By tapping into the emerging infrastructure of the Internet of Things, the necklace wirelessly receives real-time heartbeat data from a paired device, and interprets it into the affective expressions, embedded into the necklace. You can meet the creator of The Distant Heart and ask questions about the project and see demonstrations on Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 September 2014, 10.30-17.00 at Victoria & Albert Museum. Perhaps one of the best known set of early pieces of Computational Jewellery was created in 2002 by a student of the Royal College of Arts for Professor Kevin Warwick Cyborg 2.0 experiment. Sure at first site these necklace and the bracelet could be mistaken with a techno-bling, But they did in fact reflect a remarkable advance in science, implicit interaction and affective design. This was a first time a peace of jewellery on one person was wirelessly connected to the senses of the other person. The implant in Proffessor Warwick's arm was connected both to his nervous system and to the web. when he felt cal, the necklace that his wife Irena war was glowing blue. When it was exited, the necklace was glowing red.
|