Sophia Brueckner: Technarte Los Angeles

Stamps Assistant Professor Sophia Brueckner will be a featured speaker on the future of wearable technology at Technarte, an international conference on Art and Technology, at the Downtown Independent Theater in Los Angeles November 16 – 17. 

Since 2006, Technarte has focused on the most innovative artistic disciplines that use technology as the main tool for creation. Themes include Wearable Tech, Robotic Art, Bioart, Nanoart, Interactive Architecture, Big Data Art, Human-Computer Interaction, 3D Scanning/​Printing and much more. During two days, artists, designers, and professionals from all around the world will meet in Los Angeles to share their vision of the fusion between art, science, and technology. 

Brueckner will also be exhibiting her recently-completed project the Embodisuit at Autodesk Pier 9.

A collaboration with Rachel Freire, the Embodisuit allows its wearer to map signals onto different places on their body. It both critiques and offers an alternative to current trends in wearable technology. Most wearables harvest data from their users to be sent and processed elsewhere. The Embodisuit flips this paradigm. Informed by embodied cognition, the suit instead receives signals from an IoT platform, and each signal controls a different haptic actuator on the body. Knowledge can be experienced ambiently without the interpretation of symbols by the conscious mind. The suit empowers wearers to reconfigure the boundaries of their selves strengthening their connection to the people, places, and things that are meaningful to them. Furthermore, we hypothesize that by changing the way people live with data, it will change the type of data that people create.