Hacking 3 — WdKA, Rotterdam 2019

Resources but Joana Chicau

Tutors: Ine Poppe, Joy Mariama Smith and Joana Chicau (Practice); Mariana Aboim (Theory)

jointly with Ceramic station & interventions with Sound & Image + Interaction Station

This document gathers resources on the classes facilitated by Joana Chicau — a Rotterdam based graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. Her trans-disciplinary project interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreographic practices. In her practice she researches theintersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at in widening the ways in whichdigital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

Table of contents

Introduction
Main topics and Structure
- Inspecting Bodies
  - From Organ to Organ-ization.
- Embodying Other Anatomies
  - The Natural, the Artificial, the Hybrid, and beyond.
  - Reimagining bodies (on the floor & fiction).
  - Making of a ‘collective body’
- Gesture & Program
  - < Body/ies > Languages.
Hacking Revisited
+++ info

Introduction

Theme and Objectives:

\ Explore the notions of Hacking in connection to bodies, technologies and automation;
/ Introduce the notion of Bio-hacking;
\ Understand the underlying histories and broader sociocultural implications of the latter;
/ Experience a holistic process in which embodiment and movement studies play a central role see methology
\ Critically address the different topics, methods and its different contexts.

Methology

\ Rehearsing: as a way of enhancing the idea of process over product: processes of becoming;
/ Rehearsing: as a way to break the distancing between mind-body, self-other, subject-object, designer-design piece; discovery-invention.
\ Rehearsing: as a way of exploring new scenarios (beyond usership — spectatorship);
/ Rehearsing: as a way to embody different 'action play roles’ and inter-dependent forms of agency;
\ Rehearsing: as a way to rethink the construction of collective imaginaries and focus on collaboration;
/ Rehearsing: as a way to to generate new modes of thinking composition matters, participation, relations and articulations between bodies and technologies;
\ Rehearsing: as a way to nurture practices of attention/ intention — how to render the body sensitive.

Main topics and Structure

“These creatures that were made, not born”

Up "Gods_and_Robots_Myths_and_Machines" — Link — text to read

Left Gabriel Orozco. My Hands Are My Heart. 1991

Right "Golem — in Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being that is magically created entirely from inanimate matter (usually clay or mud). The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing." Source

Inspecting Bodies

From Organ to Organ-ization

Image: De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Latin for "On the fabric of the human body in seven books") is a set of books on human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and published in 1543. Source

Anatomy: deals with the structural organization of living things. Source

Also see recent entries Anatomies of Intelligence Catalog and an anatomic collection on the topic of human body proportions.

Image: In 1964 William A. FetterOffsite Link, an art director at The Boeing CompanyOffsite Link in Seattle, Washington, supervised development of a computer program that allowed him to create the first three-dimensional images of the human body through computer graphics. Using this program Fetter and his team produced the first computer model of a human figureOffsite Link for use in the study of aircraft cockpit design. It was called the “First Man” or "Boeing Man." Read more..

Image: Template, Humanscale 7b: Seated at Work Selector, 1981

"Originally published by iconic design firm Henry Dreyfuss Associates between 1974 and 1981, Humanscale is a masterfully crafted quick-reference guide for designing objects, interactions, and environments for humans." Source

Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design to optimize human well-being and overall system performance. (...) Physical ergonomics is concerned with human anatomy, and some of the anthropometric, physiological and bio mechanical characteristics as they relate to physical activity. Source

Image: CAESAR database used as training set in the research towards a parametric three-dimensional body model for animation. “Method for providing a threedimensional body model,” Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V., 2015. CAESAR® The most comprehensive source for body measurement data

"Anthropometric efforts ranging from Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, to Corbusier’s Modulor, to Alphonse Bertillon’s’ Signaletic Instructions and invention of the mug shot, to Henry Dreyfuss’s Humanscale… What these projects share is an attempt to translate the human body into numbers. Be it for the sake of comparison, efficiency, policing…" Continue reading

MakeHuman is '3D computer graphics middleware designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoids' and has gained visibility and popularity over time. It is actively developed by a collective of programmers, algorithms, modelers and academics and used by amateur animators to prototype modeling, by natural history museums for creating exhibition displays, by engineers to test multi-camera systems and by game-developers for sketching bespoke characters. Developers and users evidently work together to define and codify the conditions of presence for virtual bodies in MakeHuman. Since each of the agents in this collective somehow operates under the Modern regime of representation, we find the software full of assumptions about the naturality of perspective-based and linear representations, the essential properties of the species and so forth. Through its curious naming the project evokes the demiurg, dreaming of 'making' 'humans'to resemble his own image, the deviceful naming is a reminder of how the semiotic-material secrets of life's flows are strongly linked to the way software represents or allows bodies to be represented. Source

⋅⋅⋅The MakeHuman — 3D Humanoid Representations
⋅⋅⋅The MakeHuman — video
⋅⋅⋅Makehuman Community

Further references

⋅⋅⋅Blenderella

⋅⋅⋅Uterus Man
⋅⋅⋅Uterus Man — video

⋅⋅⋅Uncanny Valley — "The battle for photoreal CGI"
⋅⋅⋅"..beautiful 3D visualizations deliver ultra-close-up views inside the human body."

⋅⋅⋅Simone Niquille
⋅⋅⋅Kate Cooper

Embodying-Other-Anatomies

The Natural, the Artificial, the Hybrid, and beyond.

From DIY biohacking to mass customisation or being "programmed on-demand"

Image: Iron prosthetic hand believed to have been owned by Götz von Berlichingen (1480–1562)

"A prosthesis (plural: prostheses; from Ancient Greek prosthesis, "addition, application, attachment")" Source

Image: Project Sparthan — 3D printable prosthetic hands. Source

"Marshall McLuhan took such ideas further. In his terminology, the extensions of man are all media. In "Understanding Media" he suggested that, "any invention of technology is an extension of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body" (1964, p.55). The upshot is that,"by continuously embracing technologies, we relate to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions" (p.56)."" Source: Articial Organs

Image: The neurostimulator mounted in Pleij's back. Source

According to Biohack.me, "Grinders are passionate individuals who believe the tools and knowledge of science belong to everyone. Grinders practice functional extreme body modification in an effort to improve the human condition. [Grinders] hack [them]selves with electronic hardware to extend and improve human capacities. Grinders believe in action, [thei]r bodies the experiment." Source
See also: Do-it-yourself biology

further references

⋅⋅⋅A holiday from being human (GoatMan)

⋅⋅⋅Alternative Limb Project

body and data:
⋅⋅⋅Documentary
⋅⋅⋅Cyborg Arts
⋅⋅⋅Amy Karle
⋅⋅⋅Institute of Human Obsolescence
⋅⋅⋅Martha Rosler
⋅⋅⋅Choy Ka Fai

body and surveillance:
⋅⋅⋅Zach Blas
⋅⋅⋅Eric Minh Cuong Castaing 02

body and wearables:
⋅⋅⋅Hacking the body by Kate Sichio ⋅⋅⋅Eric Minh Cuong Castaing 01
⋅⋅⋅Rebecca Horn
⋅⋅⋅Rehab Training Performance by Geumhyung Jeong
⋅⋅⋅Various Examples

robotics:
⋅⋅⋅Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies by Stelarc
⋅⋅⋅ Robots that come ever closer to the form of the human body

Image: Source: Marie Chouinard

	* Exercise 01:

Reimagining bodies: on the floor & fiction

	* Exercise 02:

Making of a ‘collective body’ and how to negotiate ambient sociality

Gesture & Program

In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which, if any, action is appropriate. Agents are colloquially known as bots, from robot. They may be embodied, as when execution is paired with a robot body, or as software such as a chatbot executing on a phone (e.g. Siri) or other computing device. Software agents may be autonomous or work together with other agents or people. Software agents interacting with people (e.g. chatbots, human-robot interaction environments) may possess human-like qualities such as natural language understanding and speech, personality or embody humanoid form.

Related and derived concepts include intelligent agents (in particular exhibiting some aspects of artificial intelligence, such as reasoning), autonomous agents (capable of modifying the methods of achieving their objectives), distributed agents (being executed on physically distinct computers), multi-agent systems (distributed agents that work together to achieve an objective that could not be accomplished by a single agent acting alone), and mobile agents (agents that can relocate their execution onto different processors). Source

Before Siri and Alexa, there was ELIZA:

A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing Test (by Alan Turing / 1950, a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human).

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist (in particular, Carl Rogers, who was well-known for simply parroting back at patients what they'd just said) and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. Source

Image: Tay was an artificial intelligence chatter bot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation via Twitter (2016); Source

"Material agency includes bodies and social structures but also technologies as in the case of computational nano/bio-technologies presenting new human machine assemblages and hybrid forms. Barad’s claim is that agency is emergent through the ‘inter-action’ of elements and signals different and distinct agencies acting together. In the case of the archive we need to account for social practices and human bodies, but also various nonhuman agents as part of this machinic assemblage. Our example is the way a program can only be understood as part of a distributive agency that includes the programmer, computer, network, factory worker, and wider scientific, military, economic, medical, political system within which data is materialised." Data-body: human and nonhuman agency in the documents of Kurenniemi

< Body > Languages

Hello Hi There — Annie Dorsen

Exercise (in groups):

download code: https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/
the default script that determines Eliza's behaviour can be changed in the "elizadata.js" file;

or use the Processing library (import Eliza);
the default script that determines Eliza's behaviour can be changed with the readScript() function;
intructions to modify the script file are available here: http://www.chayden.net/eliza/instructions.txt

Code editors and collaborative collaborative programming environments

Atom or Sublime Text;
Collaborative writing appi part of ATOM

read carefully the code, discuss the underlying "behaviour" mode of the bot;

create a new character for your bot; and think of a scenario in which this bot exists;
write in three sentences the attributes that define the new bot;
start by thinking about a 'greeting' — how will the bot introduce itself?
then how will the conversation evolve? — you can test / perform the conversation among yourselves;
does it have an end?

make changes in the code, and interact with it;
reflect about the 'behaviours' the bot generates;
present / perform your bot to the class — what would it be like if all the bots would start a conversation?

Hacking Revisited

“Hacks, whether analog, digital or analogical, always target the system.

…Manipulations, transformations, and unconventional redesigns of technical appliances which contain both analog or analog-electronic as well as digital components. (...) The brutality of a hack lies less in the tool itself than in the modus operandi and its purpose.” Verena Kuni essay: Analogital Hacks — Source: Dominik Landwehr (Hg.): Hacking; Edition Digital Culture 2; Migros-Kulturprozent, Christoph Merian Verlag; Oktober 2014, Deutsch/Englisch, ISBN

More references and definitions: in this link.

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For information on the assignement; assessment criteria and schedule visit the official courses' website.

Other Useful Links

Research Theory Resources

Free software and Coding tools

JoBCB/HackingP3_2019