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Configurations 10.2 (2002) 321-370



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Wearable Space

Mark Hansen
Princeton University

[Figures]

Today's wearables . . . might listen to you talk, watch your gestures, and sense changes in your heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal response. . . . emotion modulates not just autonomic nervous system activity, but the whole body—how it moves, speaks, gestures; almost any bodily signal might be analyzed for clues to the wearer's affective state. Signals that currently require physical contact to sense, such as electromyogram and skin conductivity, are especially well-suited to wearable technology.
Rosalind Picard 1
Just as we can use an array of pixels to create any image we please within the confines of a screen, or a three-dimensional array of voxels to create any form within the confines of an overall volume, so we can create a precise sense-shape with an array or volume of appropriate sensels. Such a shape would be exact, but invisible, a region of activated, hypersensitive space.
Marcos Novak 2

Let these citations stand for the two "poles" circumscribing current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. At one extreme, we encounter a fairly staid, yet nonetheless exciting, prospect for a hitherto unimaginable fluidity between human body and computer: an extension of the body that takes advantage of the rich panoply of bodily signals and internal regulatory processes. At the other extreme, we brush against a visionary, perhaps truly "alien," projection [End Page 321] of a complete fluidity between body and space: a mutual embedding of both in the primary "medium" of sensation. What I am calling "wearable space" results from the superposition of these two poles: space becomes wearable when affect becomes the operator of spacing or the production of space through bodily experience.

Neither in itself sufficient to theorize wearable space, both affective computing and the aesthetics of eversion foreground crucial components of this concept. The former emphasizes the superiority of an affective basis of interface between computer and body; the latter demonstrates how space is both intimately correlated with sensory capacities of the body and yet infinitely flexible and convertible through these same capacities. Each, that is, foregrounds in its own way the creativity of the affective body—the role of the body as, at once, a source for and activator of a rich affective constitution of space.

My aim in this paper is to fill out this picture of wearable space by delving further into what happens when the body "spaces the formless," to borrow a phrase from Peter Eisenman. 3 In my opinion, the task of clarifying the nature and extent of the coupling of body and space is crucial at this particular moment in our coevolution with technology. As I have argued elsewhere, the defining material cultural shift of our time—the shift to the digital—has suspended the framing function performed by the (preconstituted) technical image (photograph, cinematic frame, video scanning, etc.) and has accordingly empowered the body, in a truly unprecedented way, as the framer of information. 4

To understand the relevance of this shift for architecture, we might do well to invoke a recent suggestion that architecture has, quite simply, displaced cinema as the quintessential art of framing for our time. In Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, the architect and philosopher Bernard Cache boldly asserts the singular privilege of architectural images as the "urban texture that enfolds all other images":

it is possible to define architecture as the manipulation of one of these elementary images, namely, the frame. Architecture, the art of the frame, would then not only concern those specific objects that are buildings, but would refer to any image involving any element of framing, which is to say painting as well as cinema, and certainly many other things. 5 [End Page 322]

That said, architecture's privilege is not merely a function of its role as a general background for all acts of framing; unlike cinema and any other technical art where framing is, as it were, built into the apparatus, architectural framing necessarily involves a negotiation between formal manipulation, built space, and the life of the body. It is both processural and...

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