Gabi Schaffzin

A peer-reviewed essay accompanies this work, as published in the Review of Disability Studies (June 2018)

My diagnosis came from a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in August 2010. She asked about my family and my love life, she pinched my skin and prodded my scars, she took copious notes, and then she wrote up a thorough report with her verdict: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic collagen deficiency. The diagnosis was no real surprise—my sister, 12 years my elder, was diagnosed by the same doctor a year or so earlier. Her EDS had progressed beyond my condition at the time—her chronic joint pain, “stretchy” skin, and immunodeficiency were much more pronounced and took a more significant toll on her daily life. Dr. Lin, however, could not have been more pleased with her findings: as a geneticist, having siblings present with similar symptoms at varying stages of severity was a goldmine of study fodder.

In her 1985 The Body in Pain, the philosopher Elaine Scarry writes of the relationship between the feeling and expression of pain. Using torture subjects as a primary study, she suggests that when “the sentient fact of [a] person’s suffering” are lifted into the visible world (i.e., when subjects scream, bleed, or otherwise convey their suffering), that the torturer has successfully objectified his subject’s body—he is now in control. Scarry’s torturers—be they actual, pain-inflicting individuals or, metaphorically, arbiters of a central ideology or cultural construct—translate the intangible into the tangible, forcing its reconstruction in the “sheer material factualness of the human body…borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty’” (14). This is how the quantified-self works as it offers a sheer material factualness of our human bodies. The steps I take become a measurement of my activity, my gene sequence indicates my chance of getting cancer. Both metrics make real how healthy I am or am not. The seductive dashboards rewarding us with friendly animations as soon as we hit our (or are they someone else’s?) goals are making visible the invisible. They inspire us to act on a condition, index us in an advertiser’s database, and compete with our friends.

Pain is exceptional. Chronic illness is an outlier. These are conditions that resist the mean, and, as such resist expression in systems where regression is favored. “Whatever pain achieves,” writes Elaine Scarry, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4). The standard off-the-shelf Fitbit or 23andMe package has no language to express a condition such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It becomes the role of the diagnosed to find a means to express her situation. What I wish to suggest here is that the type of multi-modal auto-ethnographic project I’ve taken on might be a means of expression that simultaneously liberates the subject and subverts the torturer. 

Using proprietary software to abstract EEG data into values understood by prototyping platforms such as Processing and Arduino, Biogarden uses readings from the brain monitor to change the scene in a shadowbox. As the software reads what its developers believe to be messages of "focus", it sends signals to the microcontroller, which is attached to "muscle wire". The wires, which contract when charged, lift flowers out of the vines in the scene.

This piece was installed at Felicita, the launch event for A Ship In The Woods in Encinitas, CA, June 2016.

Built in collaboration with Zachary Kaiser.

As companies look more and more towards recommendation algorithms to help them sell you things (not to mention the fact that, even now, state prisons are beginning to use suggestion/recommendation algorithms to figure out who gets parole), recommendation moves towards automation. As ambient intelligence (as described by de Vries, 2010) pervades our dressers, wardrobes, and appliances, and as smart homes become connected to the internet (and things like our Amazon accounts), our physical interactions with every object become simultaneously sites of surveillance and instantaneous commerce. In the very near future, smart, connected products (commercial, consumer good-based ambient intelligence) move from becoming a high-cost option to becoming implicitly compulsory. We become programmed by our devices.

Whisper is a device that scrambles your data before algorithms use it to provide recommendations. It can facilitate surprise and serendipity. Maybe your coffee isn't made immediately after you shower and you need to run to Starbucks where you meet the person you end up falling in love with. It can also facilitate dangerous, harrowing experiences. It's possible that your car doesn't correctly infer the route you'd like to take in the morning to the office and instead takes you alongside a sheer cliff. You, the user, choose the degree of scrambling with a simple dial that can be changed at any time.

The project was featured on AlgoPop and was part of the Soft Machines exhibition at the 2014 Impakt festival in Utrecht. The full collection of Stage 1 Prototype results can be seen here.

If, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, time and life are inseparable in late capital, how might one reclaim time as one’s own? Time’s establishment as locally-determined is closely tied to commerce and market logistics—to the point that breaking this tie may perhaps lead to such a reclamation. But how does one’s perception of time affect one’s ability (or willingness) to enact a protest against it? As an artist and active participant in the contemporary precarious labor market, I recently found myself engaged in the construction of an object envisioned for such a protest. Even after a number of iterations, however, there seems to be little hope for my symbolic actions on a grander scale; much like any capitalist apparatus, time is an ever-present force whose hegemony is broken only through a near-simultaneous, wide-spread shift in cultural practice.

The Digital Sundial uses your current location to calculate the "real solar time"—that is, the time a sundial would read at your longitude. It raises questions of global capital's reliance on precarious labor and time as a product, sold alongside the websites, articles, poems, and other output created by the freelance class.

Shape, Inc. is an interventionary program that is meant to disrupt information design’s effortless permeation as de facto representation of what is “true” thanks to a culturally hegemonic privileging of scientific fact, numbers, and data over meaning making through discourse.

This ironic and satirical speculative multi-media narrative is made up of a number of artifacts, including Shape, Inc.’s commercial prototype of a 3D object that floats above a user’s shoulder in an ever-present representation of her values and belief systems, negating the need for the user’s interlocutors to understand her through dialogue.

“Things can become so familiar,” writes James Carey, “that we no longer perceive them at all. Art, however, can take the texture of a fabric, the design of a face, and wrench these ordinary phenomena out of the backdrop of existence and force them into the foreground of consideration.” As Shape, Inc. develops as a project, manifesting itself in different media at each iteration, it seeks to force a sincere questioning of information design’s seductive qualities into that foreground.

In the past 50 years we’ve moved from large format broadcasting to micro-casting: targeted, short bursts of information, tailored to the commercial motives of the broadcaster and curated to the so-called needs of the consuming public. As scientists begin to study the effects of these new media on our cognitive and neurological processes, I find myself concerned with society’s weakening ability and motivation to stay properly informed of the goings on in the various public spheres in which it is made up.

Every culture, however, has a counter-culture. In the decade leading up to present day, for example, we have seen a strengthened “slow food” movement, working against the mass food production and distribution of the agribusiness industry. As future generations are faced with both an increasingly facile media as well as a decreased physical ability to consume the “long-form,” how will those looking to stay knowledgeable about their world years from now consume information?

Longformers documents the tools that might be used by this counter-culture as it tries to take on these challenges in the name of a well informed public. A collection of mixed media artifacts, the project considers: how the group would recruit and train new members; the specific forces they are working to counter-act; and how they would document their progress. All of this is intended to inspire a tangible criticality in our next generation of digital native. 

Built in collaboration with Zachary Kaiser and Daniel Buckley.

The YouTube Descrambler seeks to burst the filter bubble manifested by YouTube's Algorithmic investment in—and capitalist motivation to promote—popularity. 

In our brains, a new idea is born when two disparate and previously unrelated memories are connected, or when a third memory is introduced that links the two. Our culture's popular conscience works in a similar way. If YouTube is the contemporary popular conscience made visible (viewable), its financial interest in the popularity of its content is a hinderance to innovation and the birth of new ideas. YouTube ensures that popular videos are the most heavily promoted because it can charge more for ads on those videos. Unpopular or rarely viewed videos therefore are relegated to the bottom of the pile, with the obstacle of capitalist corporate interest further obscuring them from view.

A sleek, black box (referencing both "algorithmic black boxes" as well as the cable descramblers from the 1980s, which were created to hack cable systems and allow users to access premium content), the YouTube Descrambler contains a projector and control system, with its smooth facade only broken by a single affordance: an old hand crank. A user approaches a black box projecting a popular YouTube video on a nearby wall. The user sees the crank arm, and, familiar with this affordance, begins to crank. Immediately the user feels resistance, but as she cranks, she sees another video, beginning to peek out from the bottom of the projection. The more she cranks, the more others crowd around her, encouraging her to reveal the bottom video. This video is an unpopular video, which has been relegated to obscurity by the capitalist meritocratic system embedded in YouTube's algorithms. 

The YouTube Descrambler is visually striking. While referencing culture and media past, it resembles an object from a not-so-distant future. It is rather simple to build (see order form below), and extremely easy to interact with, its antique crank and handle immediately inviting users to investigate it. 

In designing the future, one must take a critical look at the present state of affairs, plotting a timeline using reference points from today as one speculates on society’s current trajectory. As such, speculative design as a teaching method—having students design objects for the future based on observations of the present—inspires a sort of tangible criticality, one that can be analyzed in the context of today and tomorrow. The learning experiences embedded in this process are infinitely valuable for the next generation of design practitioners.

Utopia/Dystopia is the result of my own learning experience, having taken on speculative design as my method of choice in analyzing our current state of affairs. Viewers are presented with a look back on a possible future—observing the artifacts of two groups, each representing opposite sides of the same coin. On the one side, we see Shape, Inc., a corporate entity driven by the notion that all of an individual’s beliefs and meanings can be represented by a physical shape. In this data-visualization-driven utopia, humans need no longer worry about the messiness of discourse, relying only on one another’s Shape™ as a shortcut to understanding their peers. On the other side, we find the Longformers, a social movement, dedicated to countering the loss of society’s ability to transfer knowledge in the long-form. 

Throughout, this project seeks to elucidate the existence of theorist Neil Postman’s “Technopoly”: a world in which the forces driving our technological change are given free reign in the name of progress. It works to, as philosopher Vilém Flusser suggests, “counter-program” these forces by taking them in, turning them around, exaggerating, projecting, and instilling them with satire and absurdity. In doing so, it envisions new trajectories, fictional places rich with criticality and questioning—two of the tools necessary to slow Technopoly’s thrust.

After three years of considering the form of information, it would have been inappropriate (not to mention, impossible) to produce my final thesis document without strong attention to the physical book. Traditionally, all DMI thesis books have been single, coffee-table sized volumes, printed in full color. To me, this felt more like a browsing form—one that may not allow for the kind of reflection I want my readers to exercise when reading my five chapters of theory; I want my argument to fit in my reader’s back pocket. Designing my book, however, I could not ignore the body of artwork I had produced in conjunction with this theory.

As such, I split the volumes up into two books: a pocket sized essay of my theory and a coffee-table-sized documentation of my work. The two were combined into the same case binding, a laser-cut plexiglass template which, when closed and viewed from the side, present a beautiful juxtaposition between the old form of the paper and new form of the plastic. This felt like a perfect dualism to complement the Utopia/Dystopia narrative.

For two weeks, my house was turned into a book factory. My wife and I laser cut, hand cut, folded, glued, burnished, transferred, lettered, polished, and then stacked twenty of these volumes.

The Prometheus Clock uses a combination of PHP, Python, AppleScript, Shell Script, OpenFrameworks, and MadMapper to search for, download, sort, and project 16 YouTube videos at once onto a custom 14-foot geodesic dome. The piece, designed and built through a collaboration of artists, designers, architects, and a seamstress, seeks to provide its viewers with the experience of Prometheus, a Greek titan with access to a constant stream of human consciousness.

The project was on display in April 2012 at the Fresh Media art exhibit in Boston, the MFA Thesis show at MassArt in May 2012, The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA in September 2012, the Mazmanian Gallery at Framingham State College in October 2012, the Fourth Wall Gallery (images below) in Boston, MA in January 2013, and at Fresh Tilled Soil's UXFest in Watertown, MA in October 2013.

Conceptualized and built in conjunction with Daniel Buckley.

Skeptic's audio-reactive light installations translate data collected from their respective environments into visual representations through an array of RGB LED's and a single Arduino board. Over the past year, the artists have installed the system at venues around Cambridge and surrounding areas, each time customizing the piece to the space in which it was being installed. When the Together Festival sought to enhance the experience of a DJ performance at the Middle East Downstairs, traditionally a concert venue, Skeptic used industrial lighting diffusers commonly found in office drop-ceilings and 300 LEDs to create an 8’ x 12’ audio-reactive display that was mounted on the ceiling over the dance floor, effectively shifting the focus from the DJ to the dance floor and reminding the crowd that they are an integral part of the performance.

According to YouTube, mashing up tracks to sound harmonious is not that hard. If that's the case, perhaps I—someone with less than a novice understanding of how sound works or songs are composed—could write an algorithm to do just that. Can the samples of an audio file be reorganized according to highs/mids/lows? Can an algorithm remix a song and result in a pleasing listening experience? Perhaps a jarring experience may be more meaningful.