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Imogen Heap Performs “Me, the Machine” at Wired

Imogen Heap demonstrates her amazing new musical gloves at WIRED 2012. “Using a unique gestural vocabulary, motion data-capture systems, and user interfaces to parameter functions developed by Imogen Heap and her team, artists and other users will be able to use their motion to guide computer-based digital creations. The Musical Gloves are both an instrument and a controller in effect, designed to connect the user fluidly with gear performers usually use, such as Ableton – think Minority Report for musicians brought to you by the DIY/maker revolution.”

Inspired when Kelly Snook invited her to the MIT Media Lab in 2009 and she tried on Elly Jessop’s musical glove, she and her creative team, headed by Snook, began developing a glove that would enable “more expressive control of the tech in studio and on stage, something I could wear and create sound fluidly with, more organically, humanly somehow.”

The gloves offer an integrated, transcendent experience for the live performer, wherein she uses her motion, gesture, and body to create and control electronic music in an organic process, almost “touching” the notes, as if they were visible around her and her bodily movement, her physical interactions, literally performed the music.

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Organic Forms in Extraterrestrial Life: The Art of Laurie Hassold

Laurie Hassold’s macabre, alien, and delicate sculptures are alarming and beautiful. Disturbingly sexualized, inspired by >radial symmetry, they resemble specimens or fossils in an esoteric collection of bizarre lifeforms that have arisen on other worlds, bringing to mind both Lovecraftian horrors and Ernst Haeckel‘s illustrations of sea anemones. Made with wire, clay, paint, bones, and found objects, these intricate pieces masterfully merge an impression of the organic and the alien, and evoke a sense of the terrifyingly sublime.

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The Fashiontech Marvels of Anouk Wipprecht: “Smoke Dress” & “Spider Dress”

Dutch fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht, who specializes in interactive garmentry that responds to its environment and to human presence/input, has created a breathtakingly beautiful dress in collaboration with technologist Aduen Darriba, which emits clouds of smoke when it detects someone approaching.

Also a source of delight and awe, born of a collaboration between Wipprecht and hacker/engineer Daniel Schatzmayr, is the dramatic, eerie, and hauntingly lovely animatronic “Spider Dress” – a prototype of a mechanic dress equipped with sensors, indicators, and controllers, created with the aim to give more power and “psychological thrills” to the sugar-sweet character that performative wearables often have. Sensoric, servo-controlled, mechanic, microcontroller-based, and reacting/attacking upon approach, surprising the audience with different moods and behaviors. To boot, it’s inspired by LIMBO, one of my favorite video games.

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“Notes from the Acrid Plain with Burton Hoary, Vol. 7”

One of the most memorable features that I saw during the Seattle International Film Festival in 2008 was a short film directed by Jonathan Ashley, called Notes from the Acrid Plain with Burton Hoary, Volume 7. It was a whimsical, eerie, darkly humorous, yet touching post-apocalyptic narrative styled like a vintage documentary, where “naturalist Burton Hoary hosts a survey of the toxic landscape known as the ‘Acrid Plain,’ peopled by the masked descendants of the human race. This chapter focuses on the Harvesters, their obscure practices and the perils they face.” I was pleased to discover that the short film is now up on YouTube.