Our bodies are complex systems that are dynamic and kinetic, allowing us to navigate through the world, experience our surroundings, and communicate with others through sensing and feedback. In order to understand our surrounding environment, we rely on ours senses; sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. New York City is a unique environment, layered with cultural diversity, historical attributes, architectural typologies, public spaces, and landscape ecologies that coalesce to form a dense urban network. Walking around New York City, one experiences many different environments formed by visual information, sounds, smells, and textures.
This IaaC GSS node will focus on creating ‘body architectures’ that serve as mechanisms for augmenting the body in relation to the vertical architecture, urban spaces, and landscape systems that form the environment of New York City. These wearable devices serve to bring a hyper-awareness to the senses, as closed-loop cybernetic systems that utilize ‘digitized’ biometric and environmental data through the use of computational tools, sensing technologies, and actuation. The design of body architectures requires hybrid design, merging multi-disciplinary topics related to art, biology, biotechnology, design, fashion, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, computation, fabrication, and robotics.
The NYC IaaC GSS node invites applicants from various fields and backgrounds who share a common interest in design processes that involve making, tinkering, hacking, coding, data collection, 3D scanning, digital fabrication, and working with physical computing technologies to explore new possibilities for wearable body architectures that evolve human-machine-environment interactions.
