wearable space
Today's wearables ... might listen to you talk, watch your gestures, and sense changes in your heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal response ... emotion modulates not just autonomic nervous system activity, but the whole body—how it moves, speaks, gestures; almost any bodily signal might be analyzed for clues to the wearer's affective state. Signals that currently require physical contact to sense, such as electromyogram and skin conductivity, are especially well-suited to wearable technology. (Rosalind Picard¹)
Just as we can use an array of pixels to create any image we please within the confines of a screen, or a three-dimensional array of voxels to create any form within the confines of an overall volume, so we can create a precise sense-shape with an array or volume of appropriate sensels. Such a shape would be exact, but invisible, a region of activated, hypersensitive space. (Marcos Novak²)
Let these citations stand for the two “poles" circumscribing current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. On one extreme, we encounter a sober, technical, yet nonetheless exciting prospect for a hitherto unimaginable fluidity between human body and computer: an extension of the body that takes advantage of the rich panoply of bodily signals and internal regulatory processes. On the other extreme, we brush against a visionary, perhaps truly alien, projection of a complete fluidity between body and space: a mutual embedding of both in the primary “medium” of sensation. What I am calling “wearable space" results from the superposition of these two poles: space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing.
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