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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Maker mind-set: DIY technology
Consumer technology is built to break or, worse, to be perceived as useless or undesirable. It means that as consumers, we're pressured to buy products repeatedly, from computers to cars. But there's a movement emerging of people who call bullshit on planned obsolescence.
From modded TiVos to pimped-out Toyota Priuses, these individuals are boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack and customize the products they buy. It's a duct tape and soldering iron cultural movement that can be summed up as Martha Stewart meets 1950s-era Popular Mechanics magazines. These are tech heads who aren't satisfied with the functionality of the standard-issue iPod so they've figured out how to install iPod Linux on it, thereby opening up the ubiquitous device to dozens of new features, from line-in recording of audio to playing video, long before the video-enabled iPod. They're homebrew roboticists who transformed old computer mice into the likes of Mousey the Junkbot. They're hardware hackers who sussed out a method to download the video off a "disposable" drugstore digital camcorder and reuse it.
And for them, the fun is in the fix. Broken gear is revived with the help of online repair guides. If there's irreparable damage, the product is cannibalized. No user serviceable parts inside? Who says? Vintage PDAs become robot brains, the LCD display in a cheap child's toy is reborn as a digital picture frame. MAKE:, a DIY technology magazine that I contribute to, calls this drive to tinker the "Maker Mindset."
MAKE: has become a hub of the DIY tech movement, but it's certainly not the only source for garage engineers. Indeed, the Web has replaced the model rocket clubs of yesteryear. Online is where you can meet the people who have launched backyard-built weather balloons to high altitudes and converted a 1970s console stereo into the world's largest MP3 player that also digitizes old vinyl records. Makers love to share and show off their innovations. Just check out the video evidence of DIY demonstrations, like the gas-powered "Shopper Chopper" shopping cart tearing through a parking lot. As cyberpunk author William Gibson once wrote, "The street finds its own use for things."
Biology as art: Genetic creativity
Last year, University of Buffalo professor Steven Kurtz was detained by the FBI as a bioterrorist. Kurtz's wife had died unexpectedly in the night of heart failure. When police arrived with the paramedics that Kurtz had called, they discovered laboratory equipment and petri dishes containing benign bacteria. Kurtz, a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, had acquired the materials for art's sake. His work comments on eugenics, in-vitro fertilization and genetic engineering. The FBI weren't too up on edgy tech art, and so they launched a full-blown investigation. Surprise, surprise, no evidence of bioterrorism was found. Still, Kurtz and the former head of the genetics department at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, who helped the artist obtain the bacteria, were later indicted for "mail and wire fraud." The federal charge carries a possible 20-year prison sentence. Of course, Kurtz isn't the only artist using genes as his palette or commenting on the biotechnology boom. And his work certainly isn't the weirdest.
If there's an elder statesman of this nascent genre, it's Eduardo Kac. In 2000, the Chicago artist collaborated with French gene jockeys to create Alba, an albino bunny with a jellyfish gene that makes her fluoresce green. According to Kac, the incredible controversy surrounding Alba's birth was an essential phase in the project. Kac's most recent piece of bio art is Move 36, referring to a key move made by the computer Deep Blue before it beat Gary Kasparov at chess. The installation centers around a plant engineered with a gene that spells "Cogito ergo sum" in computer code represented by genetic bases.
While Kac continues to push the boundaries of what he calls "transgenic art," Australian artist Stelarc, known for his nervy explorations of the relationship between the body and technology, is continuing to blur the line between the natural and artificial. He's in the process of growing an extra ear synthesized from his own cells for eventual implantation on his arm. Extra Ear is a collaboration between Stelarc and the appropriately named Tissue Culture & Art Project at the University of Western Australia. Previously, the group created a "victimless leather" jacket by growing living tissue on a polymer scaffold acting as a dress form. Are laboratories the art galleries of tomorrow? Or vice versa?
"Whenever I start a new research project, I inevitably stumble on an artist who's been there before, maybe even decades earlier," says Eric Paulos, a research scientist at Intel, a company well known for supporting tech art. "I always look to artists as the forerunners exploring the social and philosophical issues around new technology."
