I really enjoyed this project for many reasons. It is unlike anything I have studied in my career as a student or created during my life as an artist.

For this project, we initially started talking about what themes we wanted to cover. We agreed upon privacy, and something to do with gender norms. We ultimately wanted our audience to question the motives of the piece and think about what we might be saying with the choices we made. We brainstormed topics such as putting information online and why we are so willing to give up our personal information to a computer. Why are we hesitant about real people coming up to us and asking about our personal information but we freely type in these words to a machine? What dangers and precautions do we take with the different sources, whether technological or human? As a group, we were fascinated with these ideas and were hoping to explore them further in our research.

Gender issues and breaching were the topics I was more interested in for this project.  I was fascinated with the catcalling experiment from earlier in the semester and wanted to keep these themes present in whatever we created. In this sense, I think our project covers this topic by questioning who would wear our prosthetic. Do men really cry? Would this prosthetic work at all for people who have a hard time crying? By not having a clear answer to these questions, it brings the audience into our thought process and makes them ponder these issues on their own.

Our project reminded me a lot of other projects and artists we talked about during this class.

Lauren McCarthy was a huge inspiration for our group, as she created a lot of pieces that make people ask questions about social interactions. Her Happiness Hat explores the issues of how our actions change the way other people act around us. Your mood ultimately affects others and her way of speaking about this was interesting. I felt that it related to our work in the sense of it being a wearable prosthetic, but also that it had to do with mood and how we change our mood based on where we are, and who we are with.

McCarthy’s piece titled Crowdpilot also treads on the same water as ours in the sense that she’s giving the control to someone other than herself, or the user whoever that might be. For example, in our scenario, putting the hat and glasses on sends a message to a friend in your contact list on your phone. What happens next then depends on the actions of the friend, but the user is still giving that power to someone else. McCarthy’s piece is similar in that she is asking the Internet for her next ‘move’ whether she is on a date, with family, or in any awkward social situation. She is relying on someone else to help her with the situation at hand.

Kelly Dobson’s Scream Body has a similar aesthetic of the wearable. Both deal with this concept of “hiding” emotions and feelings. In order to use the notiCRY wearable, you have to shield your eyes/ face/ head. This is where the theme of privacy comes into play. Where do people typically cry in public, if any? Do people cry in public areas? Why do we like to hide our emotions? Why do we feel uncomfortable around other people when we are upset? Screambody deals with this issue by having the user scream into the device. Why do we feel that we cannot scream on the top of our lungs in public spaces? Is it out of respect for others or a personal choice of comfort? All of these questions bring up the same ideas

For the video component of notiCRY, we were greatly inspired by Miranda July and her piece “Somebody.” I enjoyed the promo video and how it has a playful tone to it. We knew we wanted to do the same with ours. I personally like projects when I don’t know exactly whether or not they are “real” or “usable.” I think that is what makes them successful and more interesting when I have to ask if they exist in real life because they tread on this unknown and strange line of real and dream like. I feel as if people could ask the same about our prototype.

Here is our promo video:

[vimeo 125712504 w=500 h=281]

This project also reminds me of the film Her by Spike Jonze in the sense that the machines are “taking control” of the humans. There is something powerful about these instances in which the machines have the power and we as humans are actually giving them that power. The main character knows he is talking to a computer but he still gives the power to the machine by treating it like a human. He starts to get involved emotionally. While our piece is not about becoming attached to the actual device, when the user puts the wearable on, they give the power to the machine because it is automatically detecting and alerting a friend without the user’s consent.

To further speak about attachment, questions that arise for me are, what happens when the owner of the wearable starts to put the hat on all the time and depends on the machine to talk to their friends for them? When does the line get crossed from assistance and attachment? This could be discussed in relation to Sherry Turkle’s  book Alone Together. While I think overall the whole book explains these concepts, the section we read for class was important in discussing attachment and the reasons that we depend on technological devices so much. One of our questions for our piece was how much should we involve our devices with our emotions?

Our first step in actually executing the project involved us testing the sensor and trying to figure out how we could get the alert to work by the sensors being placed in salt water. To do this we used the Arduino, 2 wire sensors and a blinking LED so we would know if what we were doing was working. First we tried with plain water and then we realized it wasn’t reacting so we added salt. This thankfully worked so we started working on phase 2 which was getting the device to work with a cell phone. For this, we used “Twilio” which is an API library that is able to communicate between the Arduino and a cell phone. What was exciting for us was that it wasn’t just necessarily a prototype but that we actually got the technological aspect to work. The one thing that is necessary for it to work without being plugged into a computer is a wireless device that was out of our budget. With this, our prosthetic could be used in real life!

While it started as a group effort, we slowly gained individual roles in the process. We worked through our thought process of how we wanted the video to look. We then worked mainly with filming the video for our prosthetic, directing the shots as well as actually filming some of the scenes. Alissa and I both took turns doing this. Alissa and I also worked on putting the actual prosthetic together, (hat and glasses and water sensors). We sewed the pieces together and then wanted to attach the Arduino to the hat. Alissa and I were mainly in charge of the aesthetic components of the project while Andrew worked with the backbone programming. We all put our own input into each process so it was truly a collaborative piece. I am happy with the way our project turned out and I learned a lot along the way, not only of exploring these topics of dependency on digital devices, but also technological aspects of programming which will help me to continue on in this field.