Transcending the limits of our fleshy husks: this attitude – that the fitness and wellness industry uses to target you – has a lot to do with how we got into this mess in the first place. But that’s not what this guide means by “posthuman.” Rather, it’s about understanding the consequences (for individuals, each other, and the world) that we’ve inherited through traditional ideas about humanity.
The guide proceeds by reading a series of terms common to exercise science and philosophy against each other, to critique the subjects, attitudes, and tools that make up modern fitness. A series of vlogs supplements these readings, speculating on how such ideas can be put into movement.
Anxious attachments felt towards exercise – judging every passerby on whether they even lift, counting every rep and calorie, pursuing thicc bootygains – How did we get here? What is worth leaving behind? And how might we imagine things differently?
For ENGL 799, Winter 2019: Critical Media Infrastructures, students submitted mini projects composed of several parts: they selected old pieces of media or technology that are no longer in use, created miniature Bitsy games that highlight aspects of the selected device’s infrastructural histories, subjects, or contexts.
“Farming Evolved” is an exploration of how the dairy farm landscape has changed in the past century with changes in technology. From the traditional milk can to the robotic milkers, discover how work demands on the farm have changed by exploring three different dairy farm layouts.
Many people assume that new tech is strictly better than old tech, but is this always the case? The first game is a test of two ways of inputting directions, while the second is an exploratory museum. These games celebrate the different ways we’ve historically selected directions in videogames, and asks what kind of economy, social system, user demographic, etc may encourage the revival of tech we thought were “old”. Could your next project benefit from re-adopting one of these systems?
Pokémon Junk Drawer explores the problems of planned obsolescence in videogame hardware. Drawing from the central “catch ’em all” ethos of the iconic Pokémon Red, players embark on a quest to repair the protagonist’s old gaming console, collecting electronic “junk” along the way. “Pokémon Junk Drawer” seeks to ask: how long can the owner of a videogame enjoy their property before it dies? And, once it breaks, how far will the player have to go to sustain their former experience?
No Print Media! interrogates the transition from print to digital forms and the invisibility of digital forms’ underlying infrastructure. While digital forms avoid the deforestation and oil consumption in the production of print media, they are not devoid of environmental implications. No Print Media! draws the player’s attention to these implications, not to make a statement about whether print or digital forms are preferable, but rather to raise consumer awareness of the underlying processes behind these digital forms.
Learn about technologies that culminate in the form of the modern keyboard. See what worked and what did not.
From the state which pioneered Zen Buddhism, California’s Silicon Valley has a new spiritual beacon: mindfulness. Technically Buddhist calls attention to the curious instances of technical products and experiences seeking to remedy the ‘disconnect’ of technoculture using decontextualized Buddhist philosophy and digital technology itself.
For this installation, an augmented reality app, 3D modelled Buddha, and traditional elements of a Japanese dry landscape garden embody the profound juxtaposition of situating the sacred within our screens. The interactive environment asks the user to respond using a variety of tools and devices, including and especially their own body/mind. As a technique, this project invites the user to find “Buddha in the Machine” (Williams) and reflect on their own digital rituals.
Special thanks to Swanson’s Home Hardware and Stone Landscapes for graciously donating materials for this project.
By Miraya Groot, XDM MA Graduate.
How do pedestrians’ behaviours differ when they pass through Victoria Park versus Charles Street Terminal? Sitting in eighteen outdoor locations across Waterloo Region’s three cities, I observed over 50 paths where cyborgs revealed themselves. The resulting speculative data enables the comparison of digital technology usage in various urban environments. Ultimately, Waterloo Region Cyborgs aims not to answer whether we should be using our devices in urban space, but to philosophically explore how human subjectivity changes as we are increasingly defined as “users” – of both digital technology and city space.
listen to your phone’s beating heart.
Pace-Taker is a bio-art and digital media art project that challenges the user to recognize their own feelings of anxiety through interaction with digital technology. Borrowing the notion of “pleasing anxiety” from Soren Kierkegaard’s ontotheological work, The Concept of Anxiety, Pace-Taker aims to create an experience of mindful anxiety by emphasizing the disconnect between the user’s material physicality and the virtuality of digital technology.
Pace-Taker valourizes the corporeality of the user as it asks the viewer to become aware of the somatic responses to these digital anxieties. Centering the biological heart as a metaphor for the human, this project creates various environments of anxiety as the user defines and redefines their somatic relation to digital technology, challenging them to consider this anxiety as “pleasing” or mindful, and urging the user to consider these technologies through more esoteric and speculative conceptions.
By Caitlin Woodcock, XDM MA Graduate.
Take your non-use on-the-go with iAbstain. Place your phone in the mobile carrier and proudly display your choice to actively resist the distractions of digital technology. While your phone is out of use, its battery will slowly deplete, allowing you to focus on the world beyond the screen. Go hands-free and see what else you can pick up.
By Caitlyn Woodcock, XDM MA Graduate.
Inspired by local Mennonite communities, XDM student Caitlin Woodcock’s BasketCase is an experiment in digital abstinence. When a mobile phone is placed in the handwoven basket, a sensor measures how long it rests there. When the phone is removed, the screen displays a percentage comparing the length of time the device rested to the length of time it took to weave the basket (about 20 hours). This piece highlights craft-making as an alternative to technological productivity and as a way to combat the distractions of our devices.