ORGANAMO
Instructed by Ben Hooker & Christina Agapakis
In Phase Three.
A very beginning of the project I was stroke by the beautiful microscopic images of tumors and damaged dnas. I started questioning what are the possible nano technologies that can sense our inside aliens better and my research lead me to endoscopy camera that can scan for diseases, including cancer of the stomach or colon by using a remote control. From phase 2, I design a workshop on Human-Organ Interaction Design to examine uses of biotechnology to evoke interesting questions on Human-Organ Interaction. I had a fruitful amount of feedbacks, that drew my attention towards living organ donors community and worked on tangible designs for a possible future scenario.
Settings
Mr Greg Ahn recently is registered as a kidney donor at the ORGANAMO site in order to find a perfect liver donor for his daughter who needs a healthy liver. He founds Mr Shawn Jackson who has the closest possible blood and tissue matches with his daughter. Mr Jackson is also looking for a living kidney donor for his girlfriend and has an interest in Mr Ahn’s kidney.
The conversation between Greg and Shawn begins in the chatbox and the chat ends successfully and they decide to go on a offline dinning date. Both video sketches are
available at Vimeo
Reflections
I was focusing on setting up a structural scenarios that can help my understanding to what the future would be like with the online organ trading site. There are very restrict rules and conditions in current organ donating system. I had a very personal point of view to take these procedures on individual levels to bring an optimistic future in organ donors and families.
Internet of Organs 2013
Instructed by Ben Hooker & Christina Agapakis
In Phase Two
Abstract
The IoOs 2013 workshop on Human-Organ Interaction Design provides an initial forum to examine uses of biotechnology to evoke interesting questions on Human-Organ Interaction. It’s not your doctor diagnosing your conditions but the human-organ storytelling through narrative thinking through a sense of self, a sense of the world around us and of our organs inside of our bodies.
Tools & Technologies
Dr Entico Grasso, a cancer specialist at the University Hospital Tor Vergara in Italy, has developed a new way to scan for diseases, including cancer of the stomach or colon, by using a remote control ‘spider pill’ camera with moving legs. The swallowable robotic device called ‘spider pill’, which contains a tiny camera, is also fitted with tiny legs that can be controlled remotely once it is inside the colon or intestine. While ‘spider pill’ traveling, endoscopy images of your colon will be sent to your email account with comments from your stomach.
The Workshop
As participants initiating spider pills, emails were sent to their accounts. We monitored the images of stomach in real-time.They were consented to continue sharing their human-organ storytellings on a social networking website for 5-day.
Participants' Feedback
Unexpected images.
What is the story of the images creating?
Taking pill is the commitment.
Datas collected by camera generates a story?
Medical facts don't matter.
Texts in days and years are my organ’s biography.
Is this just a self-awareness or
totalization of controlling your body?
I become a storyteller, story of recovery.
Want to get images of your organ daily? If I have cancer, yes. but if i don't, No.
on caregivers perspective? sharing the story and image of your friend who has a cancer still bother?
Privacy issues on sharing medical information.
Give personality to your organ?
Randomize.
Negotiate relationship with your organ.
Collected data creates style of the text.
how frequently? depends on the condition of your organ.
picture once in a hour, archive images, notification once a day.
Take one a day.
Be casual, just like Facebook feeds.
Possible applications:
"tummy tumbler"
"daily digest"
“Organ donors dating site”
The first person story of human organ, educational? Theraputic?
Tell a story of organ having cancer,
not a patient.
Storytelling options:
text only
image only
image and text
2 steps of getting notifications.
text sends out first then give image view options.
How to create the characteristics of organs?
It depends on conditions: healthy, mild, bad
Raw images -> modified images
Emoticon is design issue. trash this idea.
online emotion.
organ communicates itself.
text-based.
camera collects datas that creates emotion.
E.G. texture and color, analyzing pictures of stomach conditions to create its character.
logic system. use it as an exercise. don't show.
Structure of narrative?
Make a sample to articulate.
commenting on Facebook new status kind of type...
Organ as a friend.
me and my stomach. Blogs of Wars
Instructed by Shannon Herbert
Inspired by W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn
Introduction
"A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event — it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” and, “Your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.”
– Donna Bridge
There is no such thing called a perfect source when it comes down to spoken or written words from a person, along with that person's bias and manipulated memory after a traumatic event like War. The Hiroshima Achieve Project reconstructs a map of an vast amount of historical and contemporary data onto the landscape of the city of Hiroshima along with hundreds and thousands of text and video interviews recalling what people remember of 6 August 1945. Memory, unfortunately, is highly susceptible to distortion and error. When you remember a past event, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself. In particular I am interested in examining the quality of our memories and considering the character of the writer as well as the purpose of the document. The more we know about the creation of a document the better we can evaluate it. Whether or not memories of those who were involved in wars are real or a construction isn't so important in the context of War archiving.
The diaries, memoirs, and letters
Countless soldiers wrote diaries under the difficult circumstances of war. In the first world war, they were not allowed to write about certain things – their position, the conditions, suspected enemy movements or plans for attacks. All the letters sent home would be censored to prevent anything confidential being sent home to families. A hidden political agenda of the censorship was about preventing riots and all sorts of unwanted problems. If the truth about the horrific conditions of war were found out, families would campaign to stop the war and it could also reduce the number of men that signed up for the army. Those who forced to live in this 'happy bubble' only could write "we had a quiet day today" that actually means "we've been bombed to pieces." The intension of writing a diary is personal, it has no intended audience. When provided in its pure form - as written with no editing or polishing in later years - it is as close as we can get to hearing the author speak to us without reservation. Even though no audience is intended, there may be cases where an audience is implied. Soldiers in particular do not have the luxury of privacy and their diaries could be read by others as I mentions the above 'happy bubble' for instance. In those cases, the author will be self-editing as he writes and this must be taken into consideration while reading. The letters and diaries that have come to light cover every conflict since the middle nineteenth century when the spread of literacy made it possible for the ordinary soldier to keep a personal record or to write home. After the first world war is concluded some diaries are revised and published as memoirs (e.g., A German officer Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and a British soldier George Coppard's With A Machine Gun To Cambrai) while many diaries still remain to be discovered in chests and cupboard drawers. Internet empowers the chance to open these sources to the public. Many private websites have published war diaries. The blog of letters written by a British soldier William Henry Bonser Lamin during the first world war have been published on the internet by his grandson and gained large publicity with millions of readers.
The war blogs, archiving war experience
The closer in time to the events recorded the more accurate the report, at least from the author's point of view. Along with technological advances, the Internet, specifically blogs, has increased and accelerated the information coming out of war zone. Blogs, essentially interactive online diaries or journals, gave common soldiers the ability to speak and perform eyewitness the war journalism. This is a realtime war experience coming from anyone with internet connections can read and write the graphic descriptions, complex emotions, and varied opinions of events. The blogs during the Iraq war shows clearly how important it is for soldiers to speak out about what they are experiencing. One of the most interesting collections of data in the Hiroshima archive is the collections of photographs that people have taken from different locations of the city. Each photograph is geotagged to show the place and the angle of the photo including aerial photos taken by U.S. military aircraft. I look at it not only as a situational historical map for future archive project on events with geographical changes for people trying to archive the experiences but also realtime archival projects. What about geotagging war blogs to construct real-time archive to raise the accuracy of reconstruction of historical information from personal experience? Can the interactivity of bloggers and readers generate to passionate discussions? When archiving the document in realtime of war, how to control vocabularies? All the controlled vocabulary has to be relevant to outside observers like ordinary people? The phenomenon of blogging is growing dynamically. Ordinary people are motivated and energized by technology that allows their voices, insights, observations, and opinions to be broadcast worldwide. Given the short time the Internet has existed and the oppressive controls of conventional media outlets, blogging is truly a miracle. And there is no question that it will represent a significant journalistic force in future conflicts, disasters, and events. Blogs have also begun to contribute significantly to public discourse. The power of blogs are rawness of data and interactive digestion between writers and readers. With geotagging, you can also add a location to your each of your blog posts. Like time stamps, help readers fine posts from a certain date of time, geotags give your readers a way to browse posts near a specific location. But it comes down to war posts, they are often related to safety and issues of national and international security. Several soldiers' blogs have been shut down because the content was deemed classified or dangerous to the U.S. mission. In particular soldiers' blogs function in many different ways; serving as passages for family and friends, personal diaries, confessional, and centers of discussions. Many soldier bloggers choose to remain anonymous due to the Operations Security prohibits dissemination information on exact troop location, troop movement, weaponry, and anything that should potentially compromise the effectiveness of ware fighting.
Conclusion
"It's true what they say that the first casualty of war is innocence. You watch war movies about the heroes that fought in previous wars and wish you could have been fighting with those brave men. Until you live it for real. I've found the hard way that war is not glamorous. You quickly lose the idea of being a man fighting for his country when you have to carry your comrade who has been wounded in a gun fight. That nobility is lost quickly. When I go back to Iraq or even when I was there, it quickly went from freeing a people and fighting for my country, to just plain trying to stay alive."
– Anonymous, from Iraq War blog.
By nature, the war blogs often contain political opinion, profanity, brutal images of both textual and photographic, which I think, the street truth. My approach to enact the archive of war blogs is mainly about achieve the emotional releases of soldiers and what is actually happening on the streets of warfare. We found ourselves, again and again, connecting with the authors as people and secondarily responding to their viewpoints. I also see archiving on-going war blogs could bring us a framework for understanding personal memories within the large context of collective and historical memories with objective reality. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is no organized archiving of this information yet. I would like to bring some attentions to the optimistic power of war blogs that can arouse us as human beings by experiencing unfiltered words and uncensored images from the momentum of where living memory ends.
References
1) "The archive of war diaries online." war-diary.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2013. .
2) "The Vietnam Center and Archive: The Oral History Project." vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2013.
3) "Blogs of War: A Review of Alternative Sources for Iraq War Information." infotoday.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2013. .
4) "Hiroshima Archive: Revealing the Accounts of Survivors with Google Earth - Information Aesthetics." infosthetics.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2013. .
Happy Socks Time !!
Instructed by Elise Koh & Yuri Suzuki
In collaboration with Yoon Choi
Abstract
"The happier your sock gets, the more socially active you are on networks.”
This project derived from the curiosity involved with ‘the internet of things’. We designed a trial game for two players and each player has their own sock puppet which will trigger Web application by making physical contacts with. The game will end in five minutes and one who has more postings on a social networking service becomes the winner. The trial game sketch is
available at Vimeo.
Approaches
We use a PIR movement detector with an Arduino and have the Arduino communicate with a python program running on each player’s computers to send an email whenever movement is detected by the sensor. IFTTT service connects between player’s email account and Facebook account by Creating recipes. The below state diagram shows the behavior of system of
Happy Socks Time!!
Further Developments
The initial focus was physical computing which hand gestures to interact with sock puppets. By placing them facing each other, which easily drew our curiosity over the imaginative conversation between two sock puppets. For our further development, we can post new status messages about the conversation between two socks by assign specific hand gestures – snapping, clapping, or clicking – to mediate their narratives. Also, we can use a web camera to generate real time pictures of them having conversations and post on Facebook new status messages for the future.
Facegame™
Instructed by Elise Koh
In collaboration with Greg Ahn + Yoon Choi
This is a realtime multi-player game of stacking face photos in Dropbox and players can monitor through Facebook news feed. When a new face photo is uploaded on your news feed then the file gets added from URL to the shared folder of Dropbox. If you wish to join the Face Game, simply accept Dropbox invitations, take a picture & post it on Facebook.
Rules
✓ Recommend numbers of players are 4.
✓ Required materials are Facebook account, Dropbox account, Photo Booth, and Photoshop.
✓ First player/modiator initiates the game starts
✓ The order of players will be determined by the order of dropbox acceptances.
✓ Players will be notified through dropbox for their turns.
The file size has to be min 40k & max 100k.
✓ The Face Game ends when the maximum capacity(1mb) reaches.
✓ Loser is the player that cannot add the file into the shared folder without going over the limit of 1mb.
✓ Winner is the player who went right before the loser
Trial Pictures
Feedbacks
Upsides:
Counting numbers of file size
Social media pollution
Public performance
Dropbox limit is a good way of mechanism
Downsides:
No order requires
Add srussian roulette
Suggestion:
Change the name of the game to TOP FACE – Stack your faces on top of your friends' faces 
