Allen Wang
A Corporeal Instrumentality Project
Interventions towards a human-embodied reckoning of dimensionalities through Situationism and Maker Culture.
Interventions towards a human-embodied reckoning of dimensionalities through Situationism and Maker Culture.
Invocation:*
“Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of deterministic thinking, space and time remain frozen abstractions. Place and occasion constitute each other’s realization in human terms.”
—Aldo van Eyck (1961)
Insight
A Corporeal Instrumentality Project encompasses a series of speculative design artifacts and interventions which explore alternative methods for reckoning space, time, and other dimensions through the body. They take the form of existing instruments (tools that quantify a dimension according to a system of measurement) which are “hacked” to substitute cardinality for corporeality—for example, a wristwatch where the second hand advances not with the steady vibration of a quartz crystal, but at the variable rhythm of a heartbeat.
Idea
These are not products manufactured in the traditional paradigm, but decentralized prototypes under the umbrella of DIY. Step-by-step tutorials for this watch (as well as similar projects) are shared on an online wiki, welcoming readers to give them a try and even contribute their own creations
Impact
Along the Situationist critique, the meta-project celebrates the creativity and curiosity of Makers as a driving force for interventionism at an individual scale, while leveraging the collective, grassroots impulse of Maker Culture to challenge endemic structuralisms in how modernized society quantifies the world around us.
