Reconfigured Vision was a collaborative project developed during Ilona Sagar’s three-month residency at Art+Technology SPACE studios. The project culminated in a public discussion that brought together invited collaborators and Ilona Sagar in a co-inquiry exploring our relationship to assistive technologies, questioning how we might protect individual agency and subjective experience within an era of redesigned biopolitics,  considering the extent to which the devices we rely on orchestrate and regulate the environments we inhabit.

​

Working in collaboration with OxSight and Torr Vision Lab organisations developing devices to assist users who are registered legally blind, alongside Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research Cambridge’s Human Experiences & Design Group, artist Arron McPeake, and Design for Disability, the group was invited to imagine new ways of rendering the physical environment and translating its objects into sonic semantics.​

​

Testing wearable vision enhancement tools acted as a catalyst for a much wider exploration into the politics and language of assistive technologies. The idea that bodies are either enhanced or normalised 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?

​