Body Electric

Simon Penny and Malcolm macIver
assisitants: Jeff Ridenour, Andrew Homyk

Body Electric was exhibited in the Neuro exhibition at the Wiliamson Gallery of Art Center college of Design, Pasadena, April 15-June 29, 2003, curated by Stephen Nowlin.

The Neuro Project was sponsored by the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineerring at Cal Tech, directed by Pietro Perona, supported by the Engineering Research Centers Program of the NSF under award EEC-9402726.

The goal of Body Electric was to give users a bodily experience analogous to the sensory capabilities of a weakly electric fish. It was an attempt at scientific education via direct experience of embodied simulation. The user entered the darkened interaction space. A full scale realtime 3D representation of the user, derived from the custom 3D machine vision system, was presented on large back projection screens on opposing walls. The figure was false colored based on the direction and proximity of an invisible autonomous agent which represented the prey or target. Eight channel spatialised audio also sonified the movement of the agent and the avatar of the user. The user's goal was to capture the prey. That is, based on visual reference to the mirror space represented on the screen, the user would move toward and reach out towards the location in real space of the virtual agent.

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