Wearable cities, body schema’s and architecture
I really enjoyed listening to everyone give presentations last week. Since I was somewhat reticent in my own presentation I thought I’d give everyone a better idea of the issues I would like to address in my research paper (in the hope of some pointers!). I would like to question the integration of wearable computing with architectural spaces, in projects like SWAN (from Georgia Tech) and the Wearable City (from the MIT media lab), from a phenomenological perspective that focuses on issues of embodiment in relation to visual perception and sense of place. I am interested in emerging wearable computing technologies (as opposed to already widely disseminated wearable computers, like PDA or cell phones) and their application in commercial, healthcare and tourism sectors. In order to examine the historical continuities and discontinuities in the changing relationship between bodies and architecture implicated by projects like SWAN and the Wearable City project I have begun looking at discourse around cyber cities (mostly from the book Cyber cities and the Cyber cities reader). While Christine Boyer seems to often fall into a kind of naïve realism, her analysis of the changing relationships between bodies and architecture (from modernism to postmodernism) is thoroughly elucidating and her focus on visual perception ties in nicely with my interests in relation to the Wearable City project. Sparacino (et all) have been influenced by studies in spatial orientation by cognitive psychologists, issues of architectural narrative and other media studies disciplines in their development of the Wearable City project (Sparacino, “Wearable Cinema/Wearable City: bridging physical and virtual spaces through wearable computing”). Their description of the adaptation of the users optical physiology to their adapted augmented reality hardware poses some interesting questions concerning the extension of the users body schema into an augmented reality cityscape. There are a lot of questions one might ask, like: how would this kind of wearable technology change our experience of urban places? How would the integration of this kind of wearable technology into the body schema of city dwellers change their experience of urban landmarks? How will the integration of wearable technologies into the body schema of users/city dwellers merge the perceptual distinctions between place and space and fundamentally alter our experience of urban places? So, in summary, I am mostly interested in addressing the manner in which visual perception and sense of place may be altered by the incorporation of these kinds of wearable technologies into the body schema of city dwellers. I think Merleau Ponty’s distinction between body image and body schema may be a good place to start unpacking some of these questions, but I may be wrong. For anyone interested in the application of phenomenology to augmented reality environments, you should check out “Bodies in Code” by Mark Hansen. If you are interested in MIT’s Wearable Computing projects, they can be seen at http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/index.html.