Despina Papadopoulos
The Unruliness of Matter: Gestures of Gestures
Summary
The move from ontological, to epistemological and towards a performative ontology is explored in the wearable project, Gestures of Gestures, this time starting with an inquiry into the process of training a machine learning model to try and decipher human motion and its transformation to gesture and create a sensory response in return. A sleeve is woven from conductive, reflective, and cut-resistant yarns and connected to a micro-controller and custom-made electronics that run a machine learning model. The aim here is to develop a kind of languaging between human motion and a surface that activates modulated heat patterns in response to gestures, experimenting with nuance, the skin as surface and interface and the possibility for the emergence of a logic of the senses in human-machine interactions.
Additional info
The project seeks to address a number of questions on the encounter between human performativity and machine legibility, and it begins by mapping the relationship of ontology to epistemology, and as it evolves into a performative ontology mediated through the framework of know(ing)ledge for/with the machine.
Gestures are broken down and indexed, so they can be performed for the machine’s sensors, and delineate the edges of the body as it repeats motion in order to establish gesture. These produce a low resolution, yet highly legible vocabulary of motion which then seeks to be transposed onto the training of the machine learning model and create a feedback loop where a novel woven surface becomes actuated and responsive. The heat patterns, at time tingling, sometimes aggressive, and at other barely noticeable, attempt to establish a type of communication between gesture and surface, and in the process investigate the edges of each.
The woven surface, an engineered structure that pays homage to the lineage of weaving, already beginning with the rhythmical movement of the body, is itself sculptural and malleable, the result of the metalized filaments in the yarns used and the construction of the weave.
