2010CIMUAT Espana Ddoming Hamdan August Ingles FINAL LART

DOMINGUES, Diana; HAMDAN, Camila; AUGUSTO, Leci. Biocybrid Body and Rituals in Urban Mixed Life. In: Congreso Internacional Mujer, Arte y Tecnologia en la Nueva Esfera Pblica-CIMUAT, Valencia, 3-4 noviembre, 2010.

Authors: Diana Domingues, Camila Hamdan, Leci Augusto

Institution: University of Braslia, LART Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, UnB-Gama, Brazil. Address: LART - Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, Faculdade UnB-Gama, rea Especial 1, Setor Central, Caixa Postal 8114, Gama-DF, CEP: 72.405-610, Brazil

E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected].

Keywords: women, technology, bioscybrid, cyberactivism, mixed reality

Title: Biocybrid body and rituals in urban mixed life1

Enactive bodily condition was expanded by Software Art and its sophisticated

interface design, bringing a proposal for a novel kind of art related to aesthetic,

anthropological, philosophical changes and challenges in life and social relationships.

Locative interface activates an interstitial zone between physical space and data space, and

configures a biocybrid existence. A cybrid bios2 expands human actions in zones that blend

biological signals, cyberdata and also the hybrid proprieties of the physical space

(Domingues, 2008a). Mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing, together with pervasive

and sentient interfaces are responsible for the biocybrid revolution and its unprecedented

changes and challenges in the history of human cyberculture. In terms of humanization of

technology (Domingues, 2009, 2003a, 1997), we should reflect on the qualities of different

technological environments and the resulting social implications that trace diffuse boundaries

between real and virtual worlds, whose roots are remotely based on the notion of feedback in

cybernetics (Wiener, 1954), now expanded by the science of interface, biophysics and

bioinformatics. LART3 researches focus on recent forms of art involving the extension of

technological and cultural forms which arise from mobile connections and urban mixed life

(Domingues, Reategui et al., 2008b), where interface design asks for modes that can provide

social experiences and on-line relationships co-located in cyber and physical space, and that

extend the contemporary fringes of cyberculture. We propose that the connected body

emphasizes rituals in biocybrid zones. The body signals by manipulating data, and its

unfolding by flows of feedback cause the body be affected and affect the environment. That

continuum generates a biocybrid zone between body and flesh - cyberspace and data - mixed

to the hybrid properties of physical space.

Our biocybrid interactive systems allow connected people to experiment a

reengineering of life when acting by synthetic senses, living here and there in physical space


and cyberspace generating a different scenario for the theater of life through biocybrid

narratives. The world where we live is no longer the same we lived in before the explosion of

interfaces in our lives. Mobile interfaces and ubiquitous computing disseminate cyberspace,

and reality is expanded, reality is augmented, reality is mixed, because the virtual of

cyberspace is increasingly present everywhere. The sense of presence is mediated by

interfaces in our daily life. The concept of second-order cybernetics related to Science of

Complexity and its emergent properties is fundamental for our speculative software written to

respond to the complex relationship art and life. A world without boundaries, in its whole

state, and the enactive mobile condition, being connected everywhere, all reaffirm the relevant

ideas of the Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, from the 1980s,

regarding the observer included in the environment, and their autopoietic mutual feedback.

Biofeedback, networked connections and wireless connections qualify sorts of computer-

mediated life that require an adequate design from the technological apparatus resulting from

the human involvement in the communication with a system, provide social features engaged

in a communication practice, exchanging the cognitive process with data in cyberspace, and

expand the metaphors of artistic discourses. Art, emotion, and control and interaction

mechanisms, included in the rules of a computer program, by software and the diversity of

hardware interface, in every device that we use in our daily actions, even when we are in

public and urban spaces, insert the cyberspace in our existence, by adding traces of virtual in

real life and melting them, involving them in an engineered reality". Those conditions create

opportunities for artists and scientists to reinvent the nature of life.

Critical issues in the field of mobile technologies connectiveness, in the sense of

Howard Rheingold (2002), discuss the understanding of the procedural specificity of

computer programs, of mobile devices, and their social implications. In mobile artworks, the

essence of the code and the performative use of technologies are adapted and transformed into

interventions in cultural activities. Such practices confirm the relevant postulation of Walter

Benjamins historical text from 1934, the author as producer, and the role of the artist as an

engineer by adapting the technological apparatus for social interventions. We emphasize the

reengineering of reality, understanding the transit of real and virtual worlds in daily life,

under the role of artist/engineer, and womens contribution in the post-human historical idea

of connected bodies.


Artists/engineers - collaborative practices and technological inventions

The role of the artist/engineer and the presence of women have been relevant since the

advent of computer machines. Familiarity and empathy with computer machines undoubtedly

surprised engineers community. Historical texts inform that women programmed the

computer with the "required familiarity with the machine's electrical logic, its physical

structure, and its mechanical operation. The women learned by crawling around the ENIAC's

massive frame, locating burned-out vacuum tubes, shorted connections, and other nonclerical

bugs (BRYSON, 1998).

It is not our goal to trace a panorama of womens presence in Art and TechnoScience.

However, we will highlight the effective participation of Allucqure Rosanne Stone (Sandy

Stone), who started her career at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, came under pressure to

pursue a graduate degree in engineering, worked with many of the pioneers in a wide variety

of scientific and technological fields, received a B.A. in film. A coder since the beginning of

art and technologies manifestations, Stone built a small computer, and taught herself

programming. We chose Stone because of her interdisciplinary way of working: she wrote

medical software, later became an engineering manager, a manufacturer of musical

synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machine, among other contributions and innovations for

art and science close to fundamental social implications, culminating in her theory

concerning the History of Consciousness program, and the sense of presence, which we

regard as the main topic in the discussion about human life and technological inventions. In

1984 she met Donna Haraway when she was in the process of writing A Manifesto for

Cyborgs, and the foundation of the academic field of cyborg studies. Stones studies

culminate in her dissertation, Presence, supervised by Haraway, and consisting of an annoted

compendium of elements in anthropology, sociology, computer science, journalism, and

fiction.

The mentioned approach related to art and technoscience is seminal for our

collaborative practices in LART and researches in Software Art (Huhtamo, 2003) - for

developing code and specific rules to propitiate several forms of communication close to

the expansion of life in the post-human culture. Those practices refer to a more general

systemic technological approach that may not be applied to other forms of media art and its

multimedia artifacts. Our central focus in biocybrid systems go critically beyond the


conventional and implicitly dualist concept of human-computer interaction and propose a

more holistic participation in the sense of a bodily continuous zone. In this case, technological

investigation requires the development of ubiquitous computing, mobile interfaces,

biofeedback and multisensorial interfaces, cross modal interfaces, data mining and data

visualization and other topics which require software development for the human-computer

interface (HCI), and the use of people in physical spaces. Intertwined relationships among

body/environment/nets ask for software capacities and different hardware, reaffirming the

ubiquitous and mobile condition and the sense of presence in physical and cyberspace.

In the beginning of the 1990s Mark Weiser (1995) announced the invisible computer;

the transparent interfaces; the era of calm technologies. The computer will be invisible and

melt in the periphery, said the pioneer of ubiquitous computing. He affirmed: Pagers, cell

phones, news-services, the World-Wide-Web, email, TV, and radio bombard us frenetically.

But when some technologies lead to true calm and comfort, they become calm. Our thesis is

that mobile and ubiquitous interfaces are part of life, they are enactive and locative, and that

we are co-located in physical and cyberspace. Our body acts and creates through biocybrid

zones in urban life. In the last ten years, projects have explored the use of technologies in

daily life, and the mobile collective computer, by using specific wireless equipment (laptops,

palms, cell phones, bluetooth, Wi-Fi, chips, RDIF tags - Radio Frequency Identification, and

other mobile interfaces), and the use of ubiquitous, pervasive and sentient computing

technologies generate a co-located experience.

Daily rituals and mixed reality: the biocybrid body and the logic of rituals

Our researches in art and technoscience take body actions as the replication of rituals

in urban mixed life with the mobile technology, and consider the body in action as part of the

ecosystem. Bodily actions by interfaces dialogue with the outside, and revert the modern

conception of the body separate from the cosmos. Science of interface and the cybernetic

principle of feedback eliminate the concept of the sphere and what is inside and outside.

Interfaces connect in and out spaces, and mobile connections transform urban space in

ritualistic space for embodied action to interfaces, augmented reality, enactive interfaces, cell

phones, bluetooth, GPS, biosensors, computer vision, and other devices are always

connecting our bodies to other devices, satellites, modems. We are in states of feedback with


the environment and the physical space. Similarly to the desire of ancient and native rituals

when people performed rituals by dancing, smoking, singing, walking, we connect and send

energies to the ecosystem (Domingues, 1997) Native cultures and Afro-Brazilian religions are

quite phenomenological in their beliefs and desires to dialogue with invisible cosmic forces.

The interactive experience can be compared to those shamans or pags incorporations,

embodiments, in Brazilian tribes, who accomplish to communicate with the cosmos because

they believe that shamans have special powers regarding the ecosystem. During rituals

entities such as Ogum, Oxum and Iemanj are incorporated, who are called guides of our

identities. Just the same, human altered identities have now social behavior, cognitive and

emotional situations shared with the responsive environments of augmented reality, social

platforms or other technologies mixed to the environment.

Urban mixed life is the condition of being connected by interfaces everywhere. The

willingness itself of being connected, or taking part in a social platform, or adding information

to place where we are in situ by using mobile technology, as a cell phone, places our body in

an expanded reality that unchain our social perception and launch it in a constructive process,

by receiving and giving mutant identity, and being potentially in the condition of non linear,

unpredictable, self-regeneration states. The mobile interfaced body feels and acts by sharing

qualities that come from the connectivity of synthetic vision of cameras, satellites, biosensors,

bluetooth, tags, codes, wireless devices, GPS, or other technological components that

transmit and exchange data, and co-locate us in virtual and physical worlds, thus

transforming us into biocybrid humans.

The mobile condition, when compared to a ritual, implies logic of participation, tribal

logic, collaborative actions, spirit of communion, of object-taboos, similar to that logic

implicit in the offerenda of religions: offering and receiving, sharing and attempting to get to

invisible forces (Fischer, 2003). We propose that mobile devices give us the same sensorial

and cognitive desire that some old forms of painted bodies, masks, feather artifacts,

maracas, and another artifices to receive and send energies to the external world, and thus we

would reach a reframed consciousness from artificial systems (Domingues, 2001). These

technologies provide us with some desires to be empowered, and artists intensify the

exploration of how technologies are changing our world perception, and create systems to

expand interactions, immersions, proprioceptions, hyperconnections, self-regenerations,


which can be compared to magic or pleasant and powerful emotion, closer to a trance

experience. Our expanded body has other limits.

Tattoos artwork and urban mixed life

The theme of the artworks we have chosen for this essay is the anthropological

presence of tattoos in human culture. Diana Domingues discusses the Living tattoos artwork

and its speculative software, which intends to create a social platform of networked tattoos

communities. It proposes the co-existence in physical space and cyberspace, and environment

evolution is based on tattoos identification patterns and members behavior traces, by

eliminating the diversity of race, geography, gender, and other cultural differences. We

propose strategies to engineering reality by the use of social and free software and a mobile

condition that activates a mutant morphology of tattoos by translating how diversity of

communication and manifested personalities influence the emergent properties and regulate

the potential interface design culminating in artistic and cultural metamorphosis according to

the social rules in Cyberculture. The project Living Tattoos uses embedded technologies in

order to exploit the a variety of possibilities of co-existence in cyberspace and physical

worlds. The work addresses the human condition emerging from the fact that we are living in

an increasingly interfaced, mobilized world where technologies redesign our lives. In its

biocybrid origin, it is a social platform for a techno-collective cyberactivism, taking the net as

a hub for creative workshops, centered in a social collaborative network that enables people to

produce contents by adding information of their lives, personality traits, and graphic images

tattooed on their bodies.

Throughout human history people have added to their bodies iconic shapes: from

flowers, dragons, butterflies, to angels, snakes, and other religious figures, and in the platform

people can customize their own pages with their tattoos and texts, images and videos. The

digital apparatus proposes the adaptation, transformation and liberation of the tattoos

condition for members of a networked community, available in free software and A-life

process, enabling evolutionary identities, enactments of members in the on-line forum, blogs,

mob blogs and photoblogs; the site promotes the aggregation of identities by sending SMS

and MMS, and also draw geolocated existential narratives in digital GPS, tracking, mapping

flows of tattooed people in urban space. Locative interfaces also add to the environment, the

geographic data of tattooed people, using Google Maps. Tattoos are sent via photos and also


messages come on phones or to the site by email. The environment and the mutual sharing of

identities provoke contamination of personal values and formal patterns, creating social

regulations and mutant morphologies. Invitations disseminated in Orkut call people to enter in

our living tattoos cyberterritory. By accepting the rules, they can send their tattoos by cell

phone or email, and the given body will go through a metamorphic and collective process of

mutations.

Metaphorically, flesh bodies participate in a sacrifice of a rite of passage that gives

back mutant and unpredictable properties resulting from dialogues. Every tattoo becomes an

agent representing a member of the collective. He/she experiences life as it could be, because

the digital body is liberated from the constraints of material and biological life. The excess of

boundaries in a poet's work is still very much alive in cyberspace. The body is exposed to

evolutionary vicissitudes and surprises of biocybrid life. Mobile and nomadic connections by

wireless and networked technologies transform the tattoos (digital shapes) in 3D creatures,

managed by genetic algorithms and the unpredictability of living organisms. In the platform,

each person sends us his/her own tattoo by mobile phone or by email. When arriving on the

platform, they are turned into 3D shapes by a graphical tool for extrusion, and its features

undergo a two-dimensional graphical user interface that makes the tattoo a three-dimensional

object, becoming a creature. Being 3D modelled they are placed in a virtual ground, a

tattooarium, to live together with other tattoos, becoming an a-life creature, and mutate by

following simulated genetic laws. The relationships of people connected in the social platform

in cyberspace, and the evolution of their communication is evaluated by using the terms of

their dialogues coming from a search engine data-mining system - which provides us with

specific traits of their personalities, and also the frequency of their communication, that

guarantees their evolution. The terms create a linguistic database and are the source for the

tattoos generative code, capturing the subjectivity of people. Pace, freedom, irritation, hurry,

collaboration or other personality trait will influence each other and the a-life in the tattoo

community. A-life algorithms are responsible for the emergent states of the shapes. A data-

mining engine collects information of the tattooed-people blog and contaminations on

linguistic and graphic levels resulting from preferences translated into interface design,

according to how communication diversity and manifested personalities influence the


emergent properties of the collaborative web site. A text-mining system extracts graphs,

trasforming data in a dynamic data visualization of social relationships.

Urban interventions in flash mobs reterritorialize physical spaces for digital partners.

Living Tattoos validates co-existence in digital and physical worlds. Reciprocity of people

and groups exchanging tattoos correspond to their desire for mutations, monstrosity,

grotesque, and mutant alterity. Expanded existence in cyberspace confirms the symbolic

power of tattoos: they are alibis for love, religious devotion, divine powers, political

involvement, protection from dangers, plea for fertility: a tattoo is the graffiti for the soul or

tattoos are merely decorative and fancy living accessories of the post-biological era. Life

transit and time passing in the cyberterritory bring a collection of experiences lived in

cyberspace as the source of emergent levels of the fantastic, mysterious, unimaginable,

fictional condition of digital bodies or digital phantoms. Another point is to reaffirm life in the

physical space by inviting people on-line who are connected in cyberspace to be together in

situ, by participating in flash mobs and meeting in public environments. In the Living Tattoos

social platform there is a special section where it is discussed beforehand, on-line, about the

places where people are going to meet. By activating a Tattoo mob (Rheingold, 2002), a

group of tattooed people suddenly meet in a predetermined place and add to the synergy of

mobile communication, portable computing, wireless networks and collective action. When

located in physical space, a GPS tracking mechanism helps users to get together by showing

where they are in their mobile devices, such as smart phones, wireless notebooks, PDAs, etc.

Simulations of tattoo images are projected on a building. In these interventions, tattoos

images sent by community members are displayed on large building walls. The cityscape

becomes an alternative canvas for body tattoos. The system uses interfaces of ubiquitous

computing, locative, pervasive and sentient mobile technologies (mobile interfaces: cell

phones MMS and SMS) to communicate with the Living Tattoos platform. Locative interfaces

are GPS and Google Maps. GPS mapping and tracking system generate an urban flow of

tattoos in city buses. Tattoos Mob is the part of the project which offers a physical

instantiation of social networks, which install urban mixed life in a biocybrid zone. The

remote control Wii activates marks on the screen which displays the city map. Arrows point

to places and members of the tattooed community locations, and people identified on the

screen present themselves, showing their tattooed body, while in Google Maps, the place

where the person lives is displayed together with photographs posted, sounds and other data


sent to the system. An urban, public wall becomes a public interactive terminal. Body textures

are projected on external walls of buildings, and transform the city into the skin of the body.

Images coming from mobile phones or messages exchanged modify what is private and what

is public. The intimate patterns of bodies become public patterns and transform the city scene.

The idea of the urban provides a framework that is independent of the literal materiality of

place of a given city. Interfaces provide different forms to actualize the city in a Urban Mixed

Life. Emergent behaviors of connected people evoke the urban as complex relationships of

people. This project provides an exploratory environment to support social interaction, and

enables users to act as content producers by sharing experiences and information connected

through new wireless devices, transforming the technologies into a dynamic experience that

modifies our way of living. Our Living Tattoos embedded system on computer graphics,

artificial life, data visualization, social platform proposes to be an example of a mobile

network governed by the social fabric of a biocybrid urban mixed life.

Camila Hamdan propose Augmented Reality performances related to tattoos, and

points out issues regarding the theme of tattoos. The study of several civilizations has

demonstrated that tattoos have been used as a means of achieving the most varied contents:

ritualized bodies that transcend force, fertility, pain and desires. As a magical element, a

tattoo allows the ritualization of the body and creates fantastic imagination.

The Opened Body Connection4 performance is Camila Hamdans proposal for a

biocybrid that co-exists among augmented and mixed reality, computer vision and the

materiality of space. During a performance, she added a tattoo on her body, on its vital signs,

by creating a biocybrid system, corresponding to her fantastic imagination design. The

performance results in the act of drawing the tag whose code is a tattoo, and the tattoo artist,

in real time, has inscribed on the back of the artist/performer the computation language of the

code referred to the form of a wing.The code in script on the skin of her body, in real time,

during the performance, added an augmented reality technology to her body. The tattoo

became a mixed reality system, because it was mixed to the life of the environment. Mixed

reality, derived from the augmented reality technology, and the use of tags for computational

code and cameras in computer vision reads that code and the result is the projection of form

of the skin, in this case, the tattoo, is out of Camilas body. Meanwhile, the audience in the

space of Mobilefest was there, and on-line people participated in the ritual. The tattoo was

done in the form of a label or tag with the computer code written on the body, setting on the


skin tissue a three-dimensional animation for Camilas whole life. In a previous version, the

code of the tags was stamped or printed on the body, and the computer code, in augmented

reality, appeared using the computer vision of cameras in the exhibition/performance

5. In the latest version, instead of the stamp, the code was tattooed forever on the

body, and cameras for computer vision read the tag. Immediately the correspondent tattoo, in

this case, a wind (fig. 3), appears in a big display: larger screen, cell phone, monitor. The

tattoo is also a proposal of Living Tattoos6 that was born in the physical space with data

virtualized between body and support, and the emptiness of the room. In the interval of flesh

data - silicon, in a biocybrid ritual the tattoo phantom is held. Another part of the ritual

occurs in the same way as in tribal logic, in the spirit of collective, community, communion:

Camilas body is offered on-line in a network through streaming as a CyberTV. The

cyberperformance configures the relationship between human, computer, and the

environment, a mixture of information transmitted in real time on-line, via streaming of

sounds, images and texts. And the channel of interaction is a social network.

The back of the performers body is offered as a landscape in mixed reality and

presented to the network thanks to the camera placed in the ceiling, and the computer vision

reading the tag and transforming it into a wing. The tag has the form of the sign of a copyleft,

that is - the letter "C" (inverted) of a marker in a 3D shape. To read the C the camera and

computer vision use the ARToolKit open source library, decoded by computer vision, using

cameras, cameras of cell phones, webcams. Camilas body was shared across social platforms

such as Orkut, Twitter, and Facebook. For two hours, three-dimensional animations traveled

through the body being tattooed, in a ritualistic moment, experienced in the interstitial space

between flesh and cyberdata. On the back, the copyleft figure tattooed as a tag in augmented

reality allowed the insertion and projection out of the body of three-dimensional animated

wings. Accordingly, the marker or tag makes a pun with the concept of copyright, which is

commonly used in reference to the rights granted to the author of an original work. Thus,

copyleft opens to newly thinking copyright as a way of subverting the laws of copyright

protection and remove barriers to use, distribution and modification, in this case, of a creative

work, demanding that the same freedom is preserved in modified versions.

Opened Body Connection is an artistic proposal that refers to the body without

authorship, the right to copy, to collective and artistic production with the use of free software

and open source. "If someone comes into your flight, but rather the sylph or a cloud, a


shadow, is a self, one way airline involved, engaging, happy to be vague, for living on the

edge of the visible and invisible" (BACHELARD, 1990, p. 73). In this sense, the body is not

unique, but open, constructed by the multiple meanings of the connection. There are

cyberdata flowing through it and beyond it, in direct contact, invisible, intangible net

sensations. It is freedom to relax the boundaries that transform the organic into a cyborg, and

a cybrid body. Skin with cloud data that are perceived and experienced by the sharing of

information coming from computers.

Camila Hamdan ritualized her body, and gave it away to the copyleft tattoos - the

body was both the skin and the open interface to external eyes of cameras and projections that

virtualize her label or tag in a form of fantastic imagination, as for the global brain that

transmits her painted body transformed in a biocybrid reality. Virtual images are embodied

in a single existential context of the process of the body as an interface that promotes new

sensory syntheses of the flesh, beyond the biological. Trials of post-human, post-organic,

post-biological, neo-biological, transhuman, from the effects of biofeedback, recontextualize

life as well, "lent wings to that love, because we feel for instinct that, in the sphere of

happiness, our bodies shall enjoy the right to cross the room as the bird through the air "(

BACHELARD, 1990, p. 68). Hamdans artwork proposes the premisse of natural flesh ,

artificial wing, and the binomial nature / cultural if we take the symbolic unconscious desire

to fly represented in the performative ritual of tattooing the flesh in the hidden code of the

Tag in augmented reality - copyleft - the code is the unique way for sharing her body in the

network, breaking with the structure of craft practices and maintaining anthropological links

by the body in copyleft.

BioArt and biocybrid systems

Biofeedback provides mutual behaviors of body signals and the environment. It

involves sensory physiology and cognitive processes that result from the analysis of actions of

intertwined body/environment, and their exchanges of information. Our recent artworks at

LART in collaboration with the scientific team of researchers of LEI (Laboratory of

Engineering and Innovation) at Gama University of Brasilia, investigate the redefinition of

human perception and cognitive process, dealing with body physiology and immediate

physical environment. We are looking for the systematic structuring of the relations between

sensory patterns ultimately derived from manufactured sensor technologies and those given


by locomotion, heat, heart beats and breathing, by taking the internal paradigms and the

parameters they should result in those contingencies leading to the externalization of a percept

(Krueger, 2004). In a previous artwork, Diana Domingues developed Heartscapes

(Domingues, 2003b), where she offers an immersive experience and enhancing biofeedback

interactions at the recently installed LART CAVE. The biocybrid system includes the use of a

variety of multi-sensory interfaces by tactile, breath, body signals transmitted by sensors,

heart beats and electrical potentials of electrooculogram. The researches of Prof. Adson

Ferreira da Rocha should configure a more complex biocybrid zone of body and artificial

system within the synthetic landscape of the heart. But our interest is to use biofeedback, and

assistive technologies in artworks are focusing on new forms of art involving the extension of

technological innovation and medical signals in mobile urban mixed life. By understanding

the organization of embodied interaction and public spaces in mobile technologies worlds,

the use of assistive technologies and e-health by taking human biosignals as traces for

communicate human of life should help any person with any ability or disability, to achieve

greater independence at all levels, at home, at work, in normal life.

Biocybrid Wearable Art System (BWAS) mobile network system of biofeedback

Our artworks in wearable art and biocybrid systems in LART use technological

innovation regarding the miniaturization of hardware systems that have enabled the

development of network sensor nodes, which allow new applications for interconnected

wireless networks. According to Carvalho (2005), those sensors have the ability to detect or

measure some phenomenon of nature, processing and transmitting data or information to other

sensors. In our artworks the circuit of sensors a node of sensors are built in an intelligent

network sensor inserted in a set of women's accessories - rings, bracelets, visors, or other

wearables - which coupled to bodies configure a Biocybrid Wearable Art System (BWAS),

that allows people to monitor, process and send to other biosensors vital signals information

and data over a long period of time. Biosignals connections in cyberspace expand body life in

physical space and it is configured the biocybrid condition . In this direction we are

collaborating for the technological innovation in Art and Technoscience, in the field of

Software Art, BioArt, Wearable Art, Device Art, developing interfaces: hardware and

software. In the case of BWAS, with mobile wireless node of biosensors using non-invasive


sensors for the body, we use the capture of electrophysiological signals of galvanic skin

resistance, and sensors for acquisition and transmission of breath and heartbeats.

The biocybrid condition regulated by biofeedback is very shamanic in the sense it

gives the power to capture biological information from the body moving in the physical

space , and they exchange energies (Domingues, 1997) Body and environment send signals

and the system is performed by inputs and outputs of wireless sensors embodied in a network

area (ROCHA et al., 2008). New states emerging from the body in the environment connected

to cyberspace and governed by the experience of its presence status in reciprocal behavioral

changes reaffirm the enactive interface by the very alive human condition transduced by the

sensorial physiology of the body and the qualities of urban life in which the enaction occurs.

The structure of the sensory-motor interfaced subject contextualized by mobile devices in the

urban space determines how to act and be modulated by events in the environment. These

results , in the near future, biocybrid systems will allow to interact with every thing, with

everybody, with every space, with everywhere, with nobody to interact with - pictures,

sounds, texts, films, embedded in the urban space, by sharing internal and external signals,

feelings , believes, values, emotions and desires, during rituals - the flneur is alive and

located in the landscape , in urban space and expand the vital signals to life.

FINAL COMMENTS

The artistic experimentation we have carried out contributes to the development of

new perceptual experiences anticipating a future in which nanoprostheses will be integrated

into the body invisibly. Synthetic images will be embedded in our everyday reality, people

will be transferred with their bodies having been extended, modified, as mutants, tattooed, and

endowed with artificial intelligence immersed in cybrid reality (Hamdan, 2009). The artworks

denotate a close and sensitive look of women artists of the Brazilian indigenous culture. The

relationship with art and body painting reminds of the Guaycuru-Kadiweu and Kuikurus ,

who belong to ancient, large, seminomadic nation and live in Mato Grosso do Sul, and whose

body painting goes far beyond an aesthetic content, possessing magical-symbolic purposes,

and linked to their mythic-cosmological universe. The artwork theme of tattoos and biocybrid

systems have implications on social issues, because they allow the emergence of social spaces

in flexible, public and private environments. We believe in artists contribution which is close


to scientists capacity of relating mobile condition and locative interfaces innovation. Practices

in art and technoscience respond to Walter Benjamin's seminal text The author as producer,

and the perspective of an artistic sense of presence in the physical world, being mobile

networked technologies the adequate apparatus for social interventions. People use mobile

interfaces in daily life, and it is apparently bizarre that they do not take into account the fact

that they can achieve an increased sense of locatedness that they did no have before. We are

located and connected all the time and everywhere, and in calm connections. Once we are

located and connected in the world, body actions are opened to social interactions, confirming

the lesson we have learned from Weisers design of calm technology, and believing that we

will enrich not only our space but other peoples space. We are in a biocybrid world - a world

as an ecosystem, with which we have mutual exchanges, we influence each other, most of the

time in our lives we are connected to machines, to the environment, and to other people as we

have never experienced before. The sense to be alive and to be here or there, that is, to be

located, is not the same. We are co-located in physical and cyberworlds. The internal body

and the signs of our life in the very sense of biology: breathing, heart beats, heat, and other

transductions to data in cyberspace affect the environment. Now the notion of body lies in

mutual exchanges between body/environment coming from biofeedback systems which

generate the biocybrid zone of our existence. Thus, interface design is a central issue for an

artist in collaborative practices with scientists in order to attain a more humanly empowered

condition, and to define the ultimate nature of our body and social life.

Figuras

Fig. 1: Living Tattoos, 3D Modeling - Diana Domingues - NTAV Lab / CNPq, Brazil, 2008.

Fig. 2: Living Tattoos, Diana Domingues - NTAV Lab / CNPq, Brazil, 2008.

Fig. 3: Opened Body Connection Camila Hamdan LART, Brazil, 2009.


Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3


Notes:

1 This text is part of the reseaches related to the grant of Prof. Dr. Diana Domingues - Pesquisador Visitante Nacional

Senior CAPES. UNB- Universidade de Braslia Brazil and to the scholarship of PhD Candidate Camila Hamdan of REUNI/MEC- FGAMA UnB and to the PhD activities of the candidate Leci Augusto PPGA Arte - Universidade de

Braslia, Brazil. 2 Muniz Sodr , a Brazilian communication scientist, proposes the bios miditico, and Diana Domingues set up the concept

of cybrid bios, concerning the human condition connected to cyberspace in the era of ubiquitous computing. 3 LART - Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, CAPES - CNPq -PPGArte - FGA-Gama University of Brasilia, Brazil. 4 The cyberperformance was realized at the Museum of Image and Sound / MIS, during the IV International Festival of

Mobile Creativity / Mobilefest, on november 14th, 2009, in So Paulo / SP. Collaborators: Dra. Diana Domingues, Tiago

Franklin, Juan Arteiro, Roni Ribeiro and Nycolas Albuquerque. Acknowledgments: Dr. Oliver Dyens, Paulo Hartman, Team

Mobilefest 2009 and the Museum of Image and Sound / MIS-SP. 5 . National Museum of the Republic, Braslia, Brazil, 2008. 6 Reference to Diana Domingues artwork Living Tattoos.

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