SPACE Studios selected seven artists for the Art + Technology residency HereAfter at The White Building, East London. The residency artists presented work and research developed through the residency, investigating augmented reality and composite experiences.

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Diann Bauer / Eloïse Bonneviot / Gary Zhang / Ilona Sagar / Johann Arens / Rachel Pimm / Saemundur Thor Helgason

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Reconfigured Vision

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Reconfigured Vision was a collaborative project developed over the course of Ilona Sagar’s three-month residency at Art+Technology SPACE studios. The piece investigates our relationship to assistive and wearable technologies, asking how can we safeguard agency and subjective experience in the age of redesigned bio-politics and shifting

governmental structures. There is a tension between sameness and difference in how assistive technologies are designed, marketed and perceived by the public. The idea that bodies are either enhanced or normalized, is an uncomfortable perspective of wearable technologies and raises the question; what is a good body? To what extent are we a product of our ‘body capital’, labour and efficiency?

 

The film combines interviews and footage that document a series of live collaborative events between contrasting speakers from OxSight Torr Vision Lab, Oxford University, Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab, Human Experiences & Design Group, SHAPE arts, Design for Disability, The Future of Humanities Institute, Institute of Emerging Ethical Technologies and Citizen Cyborg.​​​ These conversations are mediated through the hands of a stenographer, a skill used both within courtrooms and to assist the hearing-impaired, making the legal frame of the body a prominent theme of the work.

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The multi-screen, silent work, considers how these adaptive technologies might translate to a wider narrative about body extension and the role technology plays in our adaptive and habitual behaviours. It asks how we design around the body, how do the devices we use dictate our shared environment? Do we control or co-habit with designed objects?

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