Film, Video & New Media and the Upgrade! Chicago present: Danielle Wilde: Swing that Thing, a presentation on body-worn devices for performance and play :: February 9, 2010; 6:00 pm :: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MacLean building, Room 1307, 13th floor, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

Australian artist and scholar Danielle Wilde will elaborate an emergent definition of poetic body-worn devices for performance and play, that encourage people to move in unusual ways; and a series of non-augmented devices that explore how we might conceive of and develop technologies that we can’t yet imagine. By extending the body, mechanically, gesturally and sensorially we can encourage people to move in extra-normal ways, so view and experience their bodies from perhaps hitherto unknown perspectives. This affords insight into how our bodies can move and what this feels like, and the idiosyncratic nature of personal, corporeal expressiveness… extends the body with soft prosthetics to remind us of an inner state and encourage magical thinking!

Danielle Wilde has an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and is completing a practice-based PhD at Monash University, Melbourne; at the CSIRO, Belmont; and from March 2010, at Tokyo University, Japan. Her investigation is concerned with how extending the body with technology might extend our poetic and expressive potential, and what this might mean. Outcomes include cultural artefacts, as well as tools for supporting an integration of the poetic in Rehabilitation and Disability – engaging the body through the imagination and the imagination through the body to form an emergent, embodied, creative feedback loop that can impact experiences in everyday life. Underlying these concerns is a pragmatic examination of the impact of different choices relevant to the development of physically engaging body-worn technologies, including interface; interaction; and where the attention of observer and participant might lie at any time.