What technological design is lacking is a connection with life, it lacks in it’s refelection and expression of truly human emotions and expressions: we need to communicate and trade and progress and research but we also live with fears and pleasures, dreams and fantasies, obsessions and sorrows – and in this technology has mostly failed us, in giving back to us answers to our true humanity.

Some artists and designers have attempted to express such areas with more or less success. Examples of the mood machine recorder developped by k10k, the human death macbine online counter. Myself, I have attempted to create online systems that would reflect and embrass human emotions as core content and direction (savedbythebelles.com project) yet that challenge has yet to be fully tackled. The success of the Dunne and Raby project mostly relies on their successful underlining of intrinsicnly human –often irrational- reponse to technology and objects in general. The teddy bear, the pink shield.

Few technological devices manage to express such notion of humanity. In some strange ways, works in robotics and mechanical movement do, (animation in general), there is something about motion and simple basic emotions and cause-consequence relationship that do this successfully. The works of –living artists: motion MIT engeneers–.do this. Sometimes the most basic mechanical motion can talk to us, can remind us, can evoke enough of life and exsitance and the world to generate feelings of nostalgia, fear, connection, uselessness or absurdity that they become relevant to us.

Propostition for life awarness object:
I would like to propose a series of live awarness projects, little additions to already existing technogical devices and other objects that we have around us to tell us the story of what the world is about and how we live in it.

Proposed objects:
- alarm clock give you the news exacly when yo uwake up
- tooth brush is electric, it vibrates. But vibrates more if something terrible has happened today or vibrates to the temperature outside (it’s really cold or rainy or shitty, the brush tells you that, you can feel it)
- Your coat has a little electric thing that gives you a shock everytime someone dies of hunger in the world, or your fridge when you try to open it will give you an electric shock
- Your garbage can yells at you when you trow something in it – reminding you of how much trash there is and how much you might have generated
- Your ipod beeps everytime you encounter someone on the streets that you have met before, that you have past before and encountered before.
- Your cellphone beeps every 5 mins of conversation to remind you of your disconnection to the world around or everytime someone dies or everytime the forest in amazonie burns.
- Something is emotion (something in motion) and has a life of its own in my room, like a cat or a pet, they remind us of life in general and what it is we are doing. Add random elements to make them real. Give my painting motion because it wants to be alive. My chinatown fishtank is alive and evokes poetry I can watch it, look at it and feel more soothing thanwatching TV.
- (about motion, relationship between the TV live and pre-recoded stuff – it is our belief that the medium is giving us a connection to the world, an awarness of life around us and beyound us, of the bigger stuff: pre-recorded stuff needs us to make a leap of faith and believe that weare experiencing once was truly real and alive],
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Life awarness objects:
Your heartbeat is monitored: everyday it tells you if you have had any real emotions of not, when you are overexited or scared or running it gives you points or not.

Your wallet if you open it or not, it remembers.

Objets record the things we now take for granted.

Your clock give you the time of your activity and your exitment. It gives you the time of the space you work or live in. With high activity comes lots of movement, the clock reflects that, with low activity comes slower time and time to enjoy other things.

Life awarness—
How aware am I of my friends at the other end of the world.Many tools help me connect to the world, but few are truly usefull to me. Why do I hate them so much? I cannot give them the attention that is required of thema nd I am ashamed when they become the sole behicule of my friendships: I cannot ask my non technologically enhanced friends to adopt these tools. And I do not feel more connected to them through these. I register and that is the end of it. I am also in denial of where and who I belong to , I have always ran away. Ran away because the people and groups I have wanted to belong to have not, I thought, adopted me, they have not taken me in – I did feel rejected more than once, I am not shy but when these moments of non-accpetance occur I want to hide under the table, run away and cry, I often still do. Lack of self confidence for sure. Thesis is the only time when things are about you.

The new automated wired home, the wearable technologies, the speaking big brother voices around us should play a more active role in working on our real needs and concerns and conect us to reality rather that diconnecting us more and more.

We are constantly being bombarded with infomration but most of it has little meaning to us. We need to make information physcial, we need to experience this information in our bodies (antonin arthaud – the surrealist).
Also the pragramatic langage is not necessarly the one that talks to people best. The fictionalised or poetic language can be much, usually is much more effective. Fox news of Hollywood cinema are perfect examples – perez gomez…

A hat that get the amount of light outside and says: another fucking rainy day…and counts; I have not seen the sun in… 450 days. Thank you. About sound announcements: tink about japanese trains and the little pop rock slow intro

Over consumption of electricity. A small plug that you put in your wall and everytime too much electricity is used, it changes and grows. (use non changing ink to start making a printed pattern appear on your wall, like wallpaper or greens growing on your wall…)

Aware of enery flows
Aware of machine around us
Aware of people dying
Aware of news and war
Aware of amount of syn
Aware of having woken up one more moring *and congratulation”.
Aware this is another night of which we don’t know if morning will come.
Aware I am lonely
Aware I am scared
Aware of being alive
Aware of political elections (regime changes in the world)
Aware of nature
Aware of temperature
Aware of chemicals
Aware of how much trash we generate
Aware of the living things (small one mostly) around us
Aware of our emotions
Aware of how much motion we generate
Aware of the people far from you
Aware of how much time you spend on your computer

Story:
We are a civilization of objects, of good, of consumption of goods. The things we own tell the stories of how we are, remind us of what we are doing here and ground us, they make us feel alive, like we have accomplished things, been things, chosen things and acquired things. They are the part of our lives we can usually control, and the part we can each keep and cherish or loose or transport. We move with these objects,

- tag for boxes to tell me they are here and how long it’s been since I last opened them
- souvenir enhancement (today, you could use xxxthis to do xxxthis). A souvenir machine dispenser or selector. Put all your souvenirs into one precious box. Every day, the machine chooses one item and displays it for you to remember and live with it for a day (or donate)—a machine to get over our additctions to objects
- a small addition to your alarm clock that invites you to record the names of your far away friends: every morning, it selects a new name and randomly ask “did you think about xxx today? Wanna call them?” [it can generate a report once a year and sends an automated holiday card to them mentioning how many times you have been reminded of them this year – also if you record the same name twice, it allows you and goes in the same pool, if you are paranoid about forgetting a friend enough to wonder whether you entered them in your system or not, you probably need to be reminded of them at least twice as much as the other ones.
- Everytime I open my wallet, it zaps me more or less according to how well or bad the economy is doing today (some stock option)… this random information has an impact
Life awarness enhancers:
Awarness of life, of death of being alive, of being afraid, of being speedy, of being connected,

Cell phone application that beeps everytime your phone enters in contact with something, connects to something else, sends it’s gps location, answers a bluetooth handshake…

Making the invisible visible. Generating life awarness.
Invisible signs of life: around us, information, friends, people who think about us, people who die, pollution, sun rising, temperature, body functions, proximity to others…
Invisible: birds and things flying, little life on your skins

work in the space of the hotel.

make poetry machines/computers.

make a little mechanical fishtank that you don’t have to feed or anything but that evokes life when you can’t even have pets. (chinatown fishbowl meets MIT machines meets antenna design).