Making Sense of Wearables, ITP, NYU, Spring 2015, Class 02 https://itp.nyu.edu/classes/msw-spring2014/works/class-2-seeing-mediated-realities/ Technology has always altered the way we look at the world; interfaces by definition are mediating our relationship to the object at the other end. Google Glass and similar emerging technologies take that mediation further. What are the implications of this furthering of and what are some alternatives?

1. Making Sense of Wearables | Despina Papadopoulos | ITP, NYU Spring 2015 Class 02: Seeing & Mediated Reality
Making Sense of Wearables
ITP, Spring 2015
Class 02
Seeing & Mediated Realities
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2. Making Sense of Wearables | Despina Papadopoulos | ITP, NYU Spring 2015 Class 02: Seeing & Mediated Reality2
What do we see when we see?

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What don’t we see when we see?

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How do we communicate what we see?

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to ourselves
How do we communicate what we see?

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to ourselves
to others
How do we communicate what we see?

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Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1904-1906 by Paul Cézanne

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"Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply
until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists."
Marcel Proust

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Rene Magritte, 1948
“Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves”

10. Making Sense of Wearables | Despina Papadopoulos | ITP, NYU Spring 2015 Class 02: Seeing & Mediated Reality10
The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867), oil on canvas, 195.9 x 259.7 cm.
Édouard Manet, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

11. Making Sense of Wearables | Despina Papadopoulos | ITP, NYU Spring 2015 Class 02: Seeing & Mediated Reality11
Photograph of the execution of Maximilian (right in photograph) Miramón (center) and Mejía (left),
19 June 1867

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Boys playing Leapfrog (1883–86, printed 1887) Collotype
Eadweard Muybridge

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“The Dialogue goggles restrict the visual field of the two participants to an eye-to-eye
exchange, merging interactivity and dialogism, two of the central concerns in Clark's
work.
As Myron Krueger has pointed out, "Many aspects of virtual reality including full-body
participation, the idea of a shared telecommunication space, multi-sensory feedback,
third-person participation, unencumbered approaches, and the data glove, all came
from the arts, not from the technical community”.
from Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation
for a Telematic Future, Leonardo
Lygia Clark, Dialogue, 1968. (Photo: Huber Josse) Lygia Clark, Oculus, 1968. (Photo: Eduardo Clark)

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from HASTAC
Speculative Computing concepts in Art

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Is reality more or less mediated with technology?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRKMFFDcoUk

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Clouds Over Sidra screens at Davos. Photo: Socrates Kakoulides

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“After my son was born, I attempted to wear a Narrative camera most
of the time. The Narrative is a diminutive, auto-shooting camera, the
size of a small lapel pin, optimized to capture candid moments in
your life. But family member after family member would spot it, ask
what it was, and slowly tense in my presence, even when I’d promise
these photos were private and wouldn’t be shared on Facebook. The
next time they’d visit, their eyes would lower to my chest pockets
again.”
from For Google Glass To Succeed, Tony Fadell Needs To Rip Out The Camera,
Fast CoDesign

30. Making Sense of Wearables | Despina Papadopoulos | ITP, NYU Spring 2015 Class 02: Seeing & Mediated Reality
“. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such
Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the
entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a
Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer
satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which
coincided point for point with it. The following Generations,
who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their
Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless,
and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it
up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of
the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,
inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no
other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
"On Exactitude in Science”, Jorge Luis Borges,
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What else can we see?

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29 Eye-Tracking Heatmaps Reveal Where People Really Look,
Business Insider

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the love jackets

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ode to a flower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIZhgLKSBaY/watch?v=hIZhgLKSBaY

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Until the End of the World,
Wim Wenders, 1991

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“Could it be that we are increasingly outsourcing our
memory capacity to Google? Surely the firm itself
should be devoting some of its staggering corporate
wealth to medical research into Googleheimer’s and
the general deleterious effect this highly accessible
website is having on our brains. Soon the day will
come when, as if in some sci-fi dystopia, we shall
see the streets thronged with bewildered, dead-
eyed people of all ages droning into their phones:
“Google … where do I live? What’s my name?”
“We have outsourced our brains to Google”,
from the Guardian
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do you see what I see?
the promise of objectivity
what is it like to be a bat
data points - how many do we need? resolution
Us - Them
what (how) we see - what (how) we communicate
[“know what it is like” generate empathy]

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“Humberto Maturana draws his view of how nervous systems, though
organizationally closed, use language to loop-through the other”
from Paul Pangaro’s ThoughtShuffler