A Manual of Birth By Aramis
This was a fun little project. It was significantly curtailed due to my illness unfortunately. I had hoped to incorporate some different tech in the book. Sadly being in actual enforced quarantine meant that I was unable to go out and get stuff. I had wanted to incorporate some light circuit stuff but my wire for that has disappeared into some dark corner of my home and has yet to be uncovered. I really enjoyed creating a story from blacking out the words. Also the AR experience was fun to design. It's slightly disjointed and I think that adds to the potential for different readings which could be fun. It really meant to represent a lot of my anxiety and worry that comes along with making and technology. I would have loved to make this a much larger project/exhibit but alas the constraints of quarantine and being ill.
I decided that I was going to make my project about the particular sense of potential that exists in the maker movement. I link it to a larger movement about technology. I have a lot of concerns and questions about how we are going to be moving forward. The election may or may not have been a factor in this. I wanted to create something where someone can work through the questions themselves. Its a reflective piece in many ways. I think it links back to a lot of the wider themes of our course where we try and question how things are and how we would like them to be. What does the future look like?
The user experience should be pretty good. There are clear instructions of where to go and how to proceed. The parts that I blacked out can lead to a confusing reading but is purposeful. I want to people to have questions about what they have seen and what that means. I want to engage them in questioning how the current paradigm works and what they would like to see in a new vision of the world.
The making process itself flowed. I was really anxious when I started. I grounded myself by doing the blackout poetry. Though it was less poetry and more story. Once I had created a narrative there I started to think about how I could incorporate the tech. The AR seemed like a natural extension that I could use to help a user navigate through the book. The microcontroller song was really just a passion project I injected. I wanted to make it play a little song and I thought happy birthday would fit nicely. The only real setback was the printer refusing to work for several days and the fact I could not for the life of me figure out how to flip the video the right way up.. The other was that I didn't want to destroy the book because of the meta commentary of it being a book about birth-control in a time when birth control was outlawed. The text holds a sort of futurity that I really liked for the project. Thus I had a light hand with the book overall and worked with limited space.
Credits:
Created with an image by Tianyi Ma - "untitled image"