Humanitarian Institute of Technology

Unsworn will pop your horn

Mobile phones become musical instruments at Colombian festival

Malmö/Bogotá 19 February 2007 – Swedish design duo Unsworn are currently in Bogotá, Colombia doing a sneak-peak presentation of their new Ophonine Pophorn software. The Ophonine is the first in an upcoming series of applications that transform your cellphone into various musical instruments. With the Ophonine you can record and play sound loops with a simple press of a button.

Thursday 22 February you are welcome to try the Ophonines at Museo de Artes at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá from 5 pm to 9 pm. Jam with your friends or strange loopaholics!

”The mobile is not just a phone – it’s a powerful and very portable multimedia computer. By downloading a piece of software to your phone everyone could be walking around with a set of musical instruments in their pocket!” says Unsworn representative Erik Sandelin. ”Unsworn don’t see people as passive consumers but as active creators or protagonists who put a lot of effort into making personal technologies truly personal. The future of mobile audio is not just about downloading ringtones – but in creating your own music, actively remixing the world you live in.”

The Ophonine Pophorn is based on Unsworn’s interactive sound art installation, the Four Ophones, which has been touring the world the last years: from galleries in Tokyo and Paris to Central Park in New York and the Ars Electronica festival in Austria.

The Pophorn event is part of the Bogotrax festival, an independent laboratorio urbano featuring ten days of free electronic music parties, VJ-spectacles and conferences on electronic culture. After Bogotrax Unsworn will continue it’s Colombian Pophorn Tour with events in Medellin, as part of the Pixelazo festival there.

The Ophonine Pophorn software run on most new mobile phones and will be available for free download from www.unsworn.org/pophorn in May 2007.

The Colombian Pophorn event is kindly supported by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and the Swedish Art’s Council, IASPIS.

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Unsworn is Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson – interaction designers based in Malmö, Sweden, and at www.unsworn.org. Unsworn design personal technologies and social action spaces.

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Posted by Juan

Your first thoughts can be: some kind of computer drive, or a memory card. Is a term to name a mobilization of people organized with the help of digital communications networks.

Flash Mob

“…In modern usage, flash mob describes a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other digital communications networks.
The term has also been applied to distributed mobs, who use similar means to coordinate sudden large scale simultaneous actions in multiple locations. An example of such an action is the widespread use of mobile phones in the 2005 civil unrest in France to coordinate widespread social disruption.
In 1800s Tasmania, the term “flash mob” was used to describe a subculture consisting of female prisoners, based on the term “flash language” for the jargon that these women used. The 1800s Australian term “flash mob” referred to a segment of society, not an event, and showed no other similarities to the modern term “flash mob” or the events it describes.”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reclaim the Streets
is a group of people with a collective ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize themselves as a resistance movement to the new corporate colonial forces of globalisation, and, more significantly, as a form of opposition to the car as the dominant mode of transport.

Posted by Juan

A weekly comic that takes a hard look at technology and life in the modern world. The comic appears online, and occasionally in print. It has been featured in Adbusters magazine, Clark magazine, and exhibited in the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Techno Tuesday is aweekly comic by Andy Rementer

Posted by Juan

Biologically speaking, an exoskeleton is the hard outer structure of an insect or crustacean that provides support or protection. But in military research labs, popular fiction, and movies, the term has come to mean a “supersuit,” a system that can greatly augment a person’s physical abilities.

An artificial powered exoskeleton is a self-powered exoskeleton typically intended for use by humans in battle, construction and survival in dangerous environments.

Technological developments have since brought the concept much closer to reality, though various problems with control, power and motive elements (the ‘muscles’ of the exoskeleton) remained to be solved.

The DARPA and other organizations have researched exoskeletons for combat for decades, but progress has been limited and the actual utility of such systems in combat is still debated (with no systems known to have reached more than prototype status).

One of the main uses is enabling a soldier to carry heavy weights (80–300 kg) while running or climbing stairs. Most models use a hydraulic system controlled by an on-board computer. They can be powered by an internal combustion engine, batteries or, potentially, fuel cells.

Another area of application is medical care, nursing in particular. Faced with the impending shortage of medical professionals and the increasing number of people in elderly care, several teams of Japanese engineers have developed exoskeletons designed to help nurses lift and carry patients.

However exoskeletons may have to compete for adoption with cyborgs (Fictional cyborgs are a mixture of organic and mechanical/synthetic parts) enhancing the human body itself with implants and prosthetics.

Yet any advances in these fields may also help exoskeletal research, in that direct links to the nervous system may become possible. This would help integrating the mechanical parts with the body, thus creating more fluent movement and control.

Cyberdyne Inc., in Tsukuba, Japan developed the exo-skeleton type power assist system designed to help elderly and disabled people walk, climb stairs, and carry things around.
At the present time, HAL is state of the art power assist system in the world.
Some sensors such as angle sensors, myoelectrical sensors, floor sensors etc. are adopted in order to obtain the condition of the HAL and the operator.
All of the motordrivers, measurement system, computer, wireless LAN, and power supply are built in the backpack.
Using the battery attached on the waist, HAL works as the complete wearable system.

Most of these systems are designed to help physically weak or injured people gain more mobility or perform rehabilitation exercises. But researchers are quick to mention other commercial possibilities for their creations: rescue and emergency personnel could use them to reach over debris-strewn or rugged terrain that no wheeled vehicle could negotiate; firefighters could carry heavy gear into burning buildings and injured people out of them; and furniture movers, construction workers, and warehouse attendants could lift and carry heavier objects safely.

At long last, exoskeletons, the stuff of science fiction, are on the verge of proving themselves in military and civilian applications. Strap-on robotic controls for the arms and hands—used to remotely operate manipulators that handle nuclear material, for example—have been around for quite a while. But the new anthropomorphic, untethered, and self-powered exoskeletons now strutting out of labs aren’t just a bunch of wearable joysticks. They marry humans’ decision-making capabilities with machines’ dexterity and brute force. They’ve got the brains to control the muscular strengt.

HAL-5, in Japan, and the systems by Berkeley and Sarcos, in the United States, appear to be the first of a platoon of considerably more capable exoskeletons aimed at real-world uses that may soon, quite literally, be walking near you.

From:

The Rise of the Body Bots Continued
By Erico Guizzo and Harry Goldstein

Artificial powered exoscheleton
from wikipedia

Posted by David