ScreamBody

Kelly Dobson
1998-2004

Full-size movie (39MB QuickTime)
Small-size movie (5MB QuickTime)
ScreamBody Energy Flow Diagram (JPG)

ScreamBody is the first of the series of Wearable Body Organs. ScreamBody is a portable space for screaming. When a user needs to scream but is in anynumber of situations where it is just not permitted, ScreamBody silences the user’s screams so they may feel free to vocalize without fear of environmental retaliation, and at the same time records the scream for later release where, when, and how the user chooses.

Wearable Body Organs

Machines influence self-conception, expression, social perception, and perception of responsibility or action.  By accessing and vitalizing the interplay of people and machines through custom interaction design and psychotherapeutic techniques, a social awareness is brought out and individuals are invited to reinvent their own existence.

Wearable Body Organs is a series of very visible, spectacular or carnival even, play-use objects-devices-equipments that both offer context sensitive functionality for their wearer and simultaneously announce their own need for existence by being used in public without being hidden and small as is the trend with consumer gadgets and self-helping devices, hearing aids, PDAs,artificial organs, and colostomy bags. ScreamBody, CryBody, SleepBody, EatBody, HoldBody, FightBody, HideBody, HouseBody... Rather than being hidden and made to go unnoticed, these "products" are designed to be noticed, as this is key in their functionality -- they are social-critical activists.

The wearable apparatuses function as transitional objects - they allow bridges between the person’s internal experience and the outside world insituations in which the person would otherwise not be able to make that possible. Each apparatus simultaneously acts to call attention to the social repression addressed by the very need for the existence of the device. Participants access sensorial energy that has been implicitly or explicitly put to sleep by enculturation.