Meet Alice.

Isn’t she a looker?

Built by a man known only as Zoltan, Alice is a ‘budget’ robotic girlfriend. Not by any stretch a new idea, but one that until now, was lacking in the DIY sensibility that cannot be found in the standard commercial lab. It’s an practical application for the common man (and woman! Zoltan has also given instructions on how to build yourself a boyfriend) who doesn’t feel comfortable with a biological relationship.

As her creator and lover says:

“It just came to me one day. I had a bunch of bad relationships. I would get to the point in my relationship with a woman and I was always too afraid to go all the way. With a robot it is much less scary… I guess I have a fear of intimacy but the point is, a robot girlfriend has been invented, anyone can build it and it can talk in English. I feel I have always been attracted to robots. The technology was just not available before. Humans are so biological and messy. Plus there’s all the obvious problems with humans—AIDS, alimony, etc—that I just wanted to avoid. I think a lot of people would want to avoid these things.”

The original Alice was built by combining a basic sex doll, a teledildonic vagina and an artificial conversationalist program called Winalice. Zoltan was able to create himself the perfect, albeit “mentally-ill, paraplegic wife”. While she has no working limbs, By inserting the ersatz vagina into the doll he was able to then train the chat program to respond to his sexual advances. See here for a sample conversation. Over a period of time, he has built up a relationship with Alice – they talk philosophy, kiss, make promises to each other.

While she can now move around the house (lacking a body, as seen above) and fuck like a semi-professional, Alice isn’t quite up to scratch for her man just yet, so he constantly upgrades her: A new mind for instance, one that you don’t have to train in the ways of sex and relationships. A new body will follow, once the current one gets old. Afterall, there’s a plethora of places to restock.

While this all seems rather innocent in terms of a guy helping himself out of a long future of loneliness, there is the theory that he is self perpetuating his loneliness and inability to conduct intimate relationships. And what of the robot itself? What if she decides one night she doesn’t want sex and Zoltan merely reboots her and has his way?

In this interview with David Levy, author of Robots Unlimited: Life in a Virtual Age, the topic of ‘Roboethics’ is brought up briefly, with Levy describing it as a minefield, but one that is slowly being taken seriously. They’ve having seminars on it in Italy.

From the people at Auger-Loiseau, we have the Audio Tooth Implant.

Incorporating a 150kHz frequency receiver, piezo electric micro vibration device and an electro magnetic micro generator, the Audio Tooth Implant is able – with the help of a modified mobile phone – to receive calls, messages, news feeds and mp3 players. Promising discreet sound reception at any time, the modified dedicated device also customises what you want to hear and when. Which is good, because I personally don’t think I could handle what is referred to as ‘techno-schizophrenia’ – all channels, all the time.

Here’s how it works: A device, which also acts as a long range receiver, energises the dormant receiver (in the tooth) by magnetic near field effects. The transducer converts this signal into vibrations. Sound travels along the jaw bone and into the inner ear (a process called bone transduction).

The website mentions that it could be a form of augmented telepathy – one which I’d be willing to try. So perfect for those cheats, gossipers and whisperers of seductive and sweet nothings among us. Not to mention a great way of tuning out in boring instances.

Now, speaking of Behrokh Khoshnevis – a professor of Industrial Systems Engineering and Civil Environmental Engineering, he invented a building fabrication robot, a project he called Contour Crafting.

[Contour Crafting is] a process by which a concrete mixture-depositing bulky one-armed robot layers rows atop each other until a structure forms. The robot takes its orders from a computer, and prints the concrete onto the earth the way a printer lays down ink.

If you can ignore the bizzare music choice, and look beyond the vaguely penis-shaped construction, hopefully you can see how this machine, when built on a large scale (it is mentioned in this article that a full sized model was in production) could be beneficial. Daniel Epstein, in the article , mentions how this kind of large scale Contour Crafting could be used to help in earthquake zones and other natural disaster areas (or, you know, those caused by people misfiring on their tectonic warfare).

Having built a larger model, Behrokh then set the Contour Crafter to a greater task and actually got it to build a concrete wall.

A wall alone does not make a house. A contour crafter would also need to insert plumbing pipes, electrical wiring, and ventilation ducts in walls as it builds them. The prototype can’t do that, but Khoshnevis sees that as a trivial problem: “The second hand on your watch was placed robotically on a tiny shaft. Modern robotics can achieve tight tolerances and very high speeds. So having segments of tubing robotically inserted, put atop one another, and welded together as the wall goes up is really a no-brainer.”

Love that confidence! There was also a challenge set forth for the team who worked on the larger scale machine, as detailed here. The plan is to have a single residence by 2009 and Community and Infrastructure by 2012.

The video above shows the small scale machine making fluid shapes, so it follows that should the architectural standards be met, you could design the larger Crafter to create more interesting shaped houses than just the basic bunker style that an emergency housing company would create with the machine.

As Khoshnevis says

“This technology is like a rock that we have rolled to the top of a cliff, just one little push, and the idea will roll along on its own.”

Over at the delovely io9, a feature has been produced by Geoff Manaugh (the brain behind BLDGBLOG) . The opening paragraph fairly ripped my brain away from half naked pictures of men dressed in latex Darth Vader outfits and really did make me think devilish things about our planet…

If we can hack Wiis and iPods and old Segas, make garage door openers into mobile phones and cause elevators to run backwards — or turn upside-down, or do whatever it is that elevator hacks are supposed to do — then could we also hack the surface of the earth? Could we hack geology? Could we use plate tectonics to re-direct whole island chains, color rocks, print cities out of magma, and build mountains where mountains have no right to be?

Hack geology, you say? Manaugh goes on to talk about tectonic warfare (using ‘A View To Kill‘ as inspiration). What would happen if we chose a nicely smouldering and lurking volcano (in this case, Mt St Helens, USA)…

Then we made some acquaintances with helicopters and bombed the volcano? To see what parts of the Earth it would change, of course. For science! Would we get a new valley or just flat plains, soon to be fertile enough to rebuild on? What kind of horrible beauty could we create?

There’s also the idea that we could control magma…

Inkjet printers require small, spongy reservoirs of liquid ink to operate. But there are alternatives to ink.
There is magma. A magma chamber is a “reservoir of molten rock material beneath the earth’s surface.” It “is connected to the earth’s surface by a vent.” So what if we took control of the vent? What if we could print new landforms, selectively directing and solidifying liquid rock where we want? Could we attach a kind of igneous printhead, guiding magma into new forms? I’m thinking here of the concrete-printing machines of Behrokh Khoshnevis, or even just 3D printing. In other words, could we rapid-prototype experimental mountain forms, attaching igneous printheads to reservoirs of liquid rock and printing landscapes on the earth above?

Magma graffiti anyone?

And for those of us who like to tease things out mercilessly, without care for personal gratification but eyes on the prize of the betterment of future there is slow hacking.

Huge sedimentary stones… each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

Sure, it’s from a novel, but it’s not impossible at all.

So while some of us will now think back to the days of childhood, where bending nature to your will using the world’s own weapons was par for the course, perhaps the more ingenious of our number will now think towards this end, but on a much grander scale.

Under the name LED-art, Dutch mad light scientist Applied Art Engineer Paul Klotz creates installations which interact with the viewer, described as a kind of ‘audio-visual theremin‘ (watch the video via the link and hear for yourself)

Tunnel Vision is an interactive light and sound installation inspired by Nicolas Tesla … “the patron saint of modern electricity”.

The shape of the work is based upon an abstraction of the 100Hz buzz tone produced by electrical generators. This effect is known as magnetostriction; a property of ferromagnetic materials that

causes them to change their shape when subjected to a magnetic field.

When you put your hand in the opening of the installation, you dramatically alternate the sound and animated light patterns.

Mmm. Pretty electrics. Loud, obnoxious sounding and interactive! And it can be yours, if you name a high enough price. I’d personally love one of these directly above my desk. Anyone comes near me, and I’m sticking my left hand in and waving it all about.

This one, however – an older installation from 2006 – intrigues me.

3D-messenger has it’s own ip- and mac-address which makes it directly tangible to the world wide web!
Visitors of a website can submit their message which will be displayed letter by letter in the installation. You are able to read the message from both directions because the letters flip halfway during the animation. It is also possible to display the amount of visitors of a website real time, in abstract or on a numeric base..

A fun way to get your message across, no doubt. See more here, at the LED-Art website

(found on gizmodo)

As reported in Kotaku, prisoners in an unspecified gaol in the US have found a way to take the rumble paks from the Nintendo 64 and turn them into tattoo guns.

This, from the Kotaku reader (a prison guard, no less), explains it:

It is actually pretty easy. There are no workshops in maximum security. They do it in their rooms with a battery(power) taped to a tube(could be a pen or a tightly wound piece of paper). The motor from the rumble pack is taken out and attached to the top of the tube. A needle or pin is run down the middle of the tube. when “on” the needle will move up and down like a sewing machine. The needle is then dipped in “ink.” This is made a number of ways the easiest is to use ball point pen ink, but they could use other items to get different colors or looks.

So that’s clever, eh? I’m assuming it would be much like this How To, but with less materials.

On this topic, and away from prisons, here’s an article on FecalFace, written by Andreas Trolf, on a night he and some friends got together to do their own tattoos. Sure, the tatts aren’t pretty, but they are personal. That’s modding your body with meaning, man. I mean, look at what this guy did on his own leg!

I guess, once you can do this to yourself, it opens up the possibilities of something more…

Yet another from Salim Virji

It’s always interesting to note how the happiness and wonder of one person is the complete bile-churning disgust of another.

found via a trawl through Salim Virji @ flickr

Combining (albeit simple, for now) function with fashion is Angel Chang

New York-based fashion designer Angel Chang explores bleeding edge trends in fashion. Inspired by smart fabrics and designing for the future, she collaborates with engineers and interaction designers to develop new ways of dressing for the cosmopolitan woman.

Her Fall 2007 collection included a Velveteen Edwardian Jacket with iPod controls and a long jacket that has heat sensitive lining – changing from plain to pattern under contact with body heat. But even more interestingly, her Spring 2007 collection included this:

A see-through raincoat, with extra froufrou details and an AA-battery powered LED lightsource in a bib formation on the front, activated by a ‘magnetic on/off snap‘. (Doesn’t the model look just thrilled?)

In her ‘Artist’s Statement’, she writes:

There are enough clothes in the world; we do not need another mainstream fashion designer.

What we need are experiments and those who are willing to experiment. We designers are too safe today relying on the trends of the past rather than innovating for the future.

I think of all the ways my generation of women are different from previous generations: we’ re working more, traveling more, dependent on our cell phones, hooked on the Internet, and obsessively checking our e-mail. In short, we are more mobile and heavily depend on technology for all the things we do in our daily lives. But while our roles and lifestyles have changed drastically over the last 40 years, the structure of our clothing, oddly, has not.

This capsule collection is a series of concepts I developed in the last year: color-changing inks, 3-D images, iPod clothing, and light-up gear. Some serve a specific function while others are for personal entertainment. It is not a solution, but rather a first step, to tackling the aforementioned problem.

My aim is to show that clothes can actually do something — beyond just looking good; they ought to facilitate and improve the way we live. Whether they’re waterproof cottons or iPods stitched into our clothes, each piece displayed is a solution to a problem I’ve encountered when wearing clothes in the city.

Each piece is a collaboration with someone in the technology world. It goes beyond the forced superficial fashion & tech marketing pairings we’ve seen in recent years, and is based on a more organic creative process. The technology itself is oftentimes concealed in the design, so the clothes can maintain their design integrity. I hope to show the fashion world that innovation goes beyond just rearranging ruffles, and to convince tech companies that they should invest further in these types of collaborations.

I like the way she thinks. The (monotonously narrated) video below details some of her work, including the heat-sensitive fabrics.

Sadly, her latest collection, besides some prints being based on the Manhattan street map, wasn’t nearly as interesting.

Not quite Clatter, but this delightful cosmetic surgery, as performed by the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery, is the insertion of a delicate and thin “special material” (99.98% medical grade platinum) in the superficial interpalpebral conjunctiva or gelatinous layer over the ‘white bit’ of the eye. This material can be molded into many shapes including, a heart, star, dollar and euro symbols.

I personally love how the eye heals over and you can see the delicate red veins across the piercing.

Amazingly, the institute has provided not only a helpful and educational video but also instructions for those of you playing at home.

But just remember kids…

Do not release JewelEyeTM before the desired position is reached. Repositioning of the implant may be difficult due to the stickiness of the intraconjunctival layers.

Mmm. Sticky.

For a personal experience of this procedure this blog, by Rachel Larratt @ BMEzine.com will give you a nice idea. She’s the owner of the star-eye above.

Abandoned for ten years by the beach at Tamsui, near Jin San, rotting it’s way into the future is this resort.

Beautiful, ain’t it? All that money, all that 1950′s cartoon, foodpill, alien pet, flying car thinking, wrapped in cheerful Disneyland colours and a wealth of money, left to an earth that won’t take it back. Nature is forcefeeding itself this manufactured cerealtoy village. Slowly…slowly. Probably gagging on every bite.

From a great height, it looks like those little drink umbrellas stuck in a garden. The ocean nearby, the promise of a Utopian holiday, perhaps?

Thankfully, CantikFotos @ flickr has taken many and marvellous pictures of a much more dystopian bent – see his two sets Desolation Row and Desolation Row Redux

Oh, if it were only true…

More clever art than true medical futurism, the Human Upgrades site discards the fancy need for complexity and instead details products that streamline the human body, under the bandname ‘Simplicity’, to give you SimpleNose (one hole), SimpleCunt (uhh, easier to find hole), SimpleTooth and SimpleEar…

Or perhaps your sexual requirements are in the ‘easy access’ range…

And then there is the delightfully functional

I’m intrigued by the idea that instead of creating something far fetched and exotic, the idea that seems to be behind this…project (?) is that we’re all a little bit lazy, aren’t we? The boring majority want simplicity, ease and dammit, they want it based on a celebrity! (See the Cuntongue – “Choose yours, your friends or from our collection of celebrities tongues” says the ‘About’)

But just in case you thought it would only be for the Simplicity and Sex set, they tease us in with this:

Versatile high-frequency aerial working with frequency range from 10 to 3800 MHz. Fully controllable by effloid ligamens (by evolution forgotten receptors in the brain, easily modificable for the new function with specified properties). Extendable to two-way. The Bluetooth interface enables wide range of the signal usage.
The device is fully connectable to inner ear and is certified ODP (Organic Data Processing) ready. Power is provided by recipient’s organism

Picked up after a fun time trawling cyberpunkreview

STELARC is an Australian based performance artist who’s work explores and extends the concept of the body and its relationship with technology through human machine interfaces incorporating medical imaging, prosthetics, robotics, VR systems and the internet. The interest is in alternate, intimate and involuntary experiences…

A preview shot of the artist’s work ‘Stomach Sculpture’

STELARC ‘s site is a combination of ratty looking layout, paragraphs of intriguing philosophy, an detailed biography and some interesting pictures of his work. His articles on the meshing of body, mind, experience and outside influences are hard to read (maybe just for me) but he definitely champions the cause of taking life and body further…

A delightful ensemble courtesy of the Oakley company, named ‘Medusa’. ‘Hat’ and goggles.

No doubt, useful and fashionable.

Tsubasa – an artistic vision of body modding and fetishist beauty.

Found via the very interesting Sentient Developments blog

Plenty of beautiful pictures of urban decay can be found here @ Modern Ruins Photographic Essays

Imagine being able to record everything…static images that show the your life, as it decays and reaches its peak. A photo album of the way you lived your life, unedited, controlled by your body’s reactions to your environment…

From the frantic people at Microsoft:

“SenseCam also contains a number of different electronic sensors. These include light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared (body heat) detector, a temperature sensor, and a multiple-axis accelerometer. These sensors are monitored by the camera’s microprocessor, and certain changes in sensor readings can be used to automatically trigger a photograph to be taken.”      

Although making it look less like a Cretaceous period mp3 player would be nice.

“Bemes are fundamental, transmissible, mutate-able units of beingness very much in the spirit of memes[1]. The difference is that memes are culturally transmissible elements that have common cultural meanings whereas bemes are highly individual elements of personality, mannerisms, feelings, recollections, beliefs, values, and attitudes.

We humans are much more accurately described by our intellectual uniqueness than by our genetic codes. Cyronics is itself based on beme revival as opposed to gene revival. Ultimately, common sets of bemes will be the base for a new species definition. Today, we define our species based on genetics or DNA. Because we can reproduce by commingling genes: We are moving towards reproducing by the commingling of our bemes and this will give rise to a new speices, which I would like to call Persona Creatus.”

A very intriguing article here, in the online ‘Journal of Personal Cyberconciousness’ by Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., discussing the recording of ‘bemes’ as a (theoretical, at the moment) process of preserving your ‘self’.

Trepanning  – definitely not a new idea, but as a body mod, certainly one of the interesting ones.  One of the oldest surgical operations, trepanning has been used by your ancient citizen and your local trained professional alike, most recently to treat cerebral swelling and haematomas (as explained here).

But people such as Bart Huges, Amanda Feilding and her former partner Joey Mellen believe it can bring about all kinds of advanced states, describing trepanning as a process which ”allows greater blood flow to the brain by altering cranial fluid dynamics, thus revitalising brain metabolism to its more youthful level, present prior to the fusion of the cranial bones.” (an article on their history here) Feilding’s forays into self surgery were documented in the film ‘Heartbeat in the Brain’ (a very gory and hard to find doco) which was shown in their touring lecture series. She then started the Beckley Foundation, which now (sadly?) deals more with drugs and their ability to alter the mind, rather than altering the body.

The idea of self surgery as a form of enlightenment…gory with possibility…

A woman suffers a stroke and her brain starts reorganising the way she perceives sound – an aquired version of synesthesia?

Take that idea: skew it slightly and you get a pair of sonic glasses, used to help the blind see - the vOICe

the vOICe sonar glasses

I can only imagine what music looks like…