Mobile aesthetics, an effective wearable appropriation of the senses

Judicaëlle Perrot 11382414 Research Practices in Media Studies – Core Course 2 Final Research Paper

Mobile aesthetics, an effective wearable appropriation of the senses: A study on digital wearable devices and how they ontologically affect human sensibility.

Abstract: The research on mobility in the field of media studies is for now circumscribed to the study of the smartphone or other portable devices (Walkman, mp3, GPS, GoPro etc.). This paper very much draws on the wonderful work that has been done on smartphones but also aims to respond at the urgency of going beyond smartphones as we see they have become part of our environment and are already being followed by a chain of disruptive innovations in the field of wearables. Academia studies ubiquitous computing by looking at computer and smartphone practices and this paper acknowledges a blindspot in research.

Wearables are by definition constantly worn, not only used but worn, by their owners. How can computing become more ubiquitous than this? Wearables are developing fast and could be mainstream in a couple of years which is why it is necessary to ask some crucial questions right now. Given the fact that wearables appropriate the body and therefore clearly constitute an intermediary between Man and his/her surroundings, this paper — clearly embedded in mobility studies but also drawing from psychology and philosophy — argues that wearables have the potential to ontologically change human sensibility and the way we are in relationship to ourselves, others and the world in general.

Introduction: bodies, technology and mobility What relationship do we entertain with digital gadgets thought of to ‘simplify life on a daily basis’? And what does change when the gadgets start to merge with our bodies? Don Ihde reminds his reader in the introduction of his book Bodies in technology (2002) that we are “embodied in relation to the various new technologies that we are encountering in the twenty-first century. Our ‘reach’ has extended now to global sites through the Internet, our

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experiences have been transformed […] we are tempted to think we can transcend our bodies by the disembodiments of simulation” (11). He then dwells on technofantasies from technoutopians or transhumanists and remarks that there is a tendency to feel that reality and our limited bodies aren’t enough anymore (13). He on the one hand takes interest in how we feel our bodies with technology, this paper on the other hand takes interest in how technologies can incorporate our bodies. It focuses on digital media technology we can wear directly on our bodies and how they mediate the relation we have to everything and how they mediate the way our bodies are in the world. Because I focus on wearable devices, my research is deeply embedded into the study of mobility.

In the first lines of the preface of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Gopinath and Stanyek write: “It is a rather commonplace notion that the early twenty-first century is the era of “mobility”. […] All manner of the human activity – the way we walk, talk, create, consume, love, listen – is increasingly tracked along and through various trajectories of movement and, indeed, is very often redefined by movement.” They also remind Philipp Vannini’s definition (2010:111) of ‘mobile studies’. According to the scholar, it is a field studying “social practices centred upon the material movement of people and objects as well as their imaginative and virtual movement” (3). In chapter one Gopinath and Stanyek write “All over the world, individuals comport themselves and perform their everyday activities with portable digital gadgets in their hands, their pockets, their backpacks.” (1). My interest lies in digital gadgets that leave the hand, pocket or backpack to directly incorporate the users’ body such as the smart watch, the google glass and the virtual reality gear and I argue that they ultimately have the potential to change the way we are in the world. My operationalization (or method) will be a constant dialogue between case studies of contemporary innovations and speculations – because my objects are so new and still marginal – regarding future possibilities and social or philosophical implications of such technologies.

To sum up, this paper is interested in the way media changes reality in a sensorial way and proposes the introduction of a new concept in order to study those changes closely: mobile aesthetics. In other words, this paper focuses on devices that make digital reality and the ‘real reality of the world’ superimpose, that make the boundaries between digital and non-digital, and between online and offline inexistent. I will demonstrate that those wearable devices become an intermediary (which is the etymological meaning of media) between the users/perceivers and the ‘real world’ and in doing so, appropriate their body and senses.

Medical research indicates that smartphones and tablets have consequences like neck pain and augmented risk of arthritis amongst young users1. It is safe to argue that any technical innovation potentially has the power to physiologically change human beings. The invention of the print for instance had as a consequence that our memory is far less developed than the one of our ancestors, simply because we don’t need it as much anymore. It is clear media devices do have an impact on the physicality of users. By their portability and connectivity, wearable devices are surely embedded in the continuity of contemporary massively used devices like smartphones and tablets, thereby taking these issues to the next level.

How can wearables change our senses and by doing so change the way we are in relationship to the world and to others? In other words, what are mobile aesthetics? Throughout this paper

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I will first have to position my argument in the field of mobility studies. Secondly, I will draw on existing research about specific wearables I take as case studies to make my claim consecutively about our sense of self and psychology, and about our relationship to the other’s emotional and physical being. Finally, and with the help of Martin Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology and the concept of efficiency, I will argue that we are witnessing a literal capitalist embodiment of the user and a privatization of her senses with the example of the growing interest for augmented reality. In other words, through specific examples studied by scholars and different topics from the humanities, I will make two main arguments. The first one, drawing from McLuhan’s idea that media are the extensions of Man, is that wearables have the potential to change our perception. The second main argument based on Heidegger’s claim that technology is a truth and a new way of ‘being into the world’, is that wearables become the way to efficiently make use of our bodies and senses in a neoliberal society.

Mobile aesthetics: There has been a lot of work done on how mobility of recording objects (reached with increasing portability and miniaturization of said objects) change the ontology of the image and the user’s relationship to it. For Richard Bégin for instance, the image filmed by a smartphone or a GoPro becomes somatic because it is recorded by the body of the person filming (or by the body of a machine like a drone), and giving the viewer the impression of perceiving the world with “eyes in your body” (2016: 107). For Kari Andrén-Papadopoulos, “mobile media technology has turned anyone into a potential testimony-producer” (2013: 764) as eyewitnesses when recording a catastrophe and into “citizen camera witnesses” when taking a risk to communicate a political message when recording violent repression. Janey Gordon, in chapter 14 of Moving data the iPhone and the future of media by Snickars and Vonderau, explains how the smartphone turns anyone into an amateur journalist, the “news” not being mediated by professionals or institutions anymore (2012: pp. 211-222).

Researcher Richard Bégin coined the term mobilography. “[...] Mobilography (from Latin mobilis ‘which moves’ and the Greek graphein ‘writing, draw, inscribe’) is an audio-visual recording practice enabled by portable media devices.” Mobilography designates the recording through sound and image of a media mobility. Such mobilography is rendered possible thanks to the portability of recording devices and the practice of space (Bégin, 2015, pp. 5-16). This paper focuses on shifting such mobile practice of media and space to the perspective of viewers, listeners, consumers, users or, what I called earlier in a voluntarily broad manner ‘perceivers’. I asked myself what would be the best formulation and came up with mobile aesthetics. The way this paper understand this concept is that the issue is no longer about writing mobility but about feeling through it. There is one occurrence of this term being used in academia.

Wolf-Dieter Ernst, in chapter 4 of a book by Renate Brosh entitled Moving Images, Mobile Viewers: 20th Century Visuality (2011), defines it as “the emergent aesthetic aptitudes, experiences and practices dependent on and resulting from mobile computing”. He accurately states: “It is obvious that contemporary users of mobile phones, hot-spots and the internet –

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constantly connecting to data space and virtually living online – have developed lifestyles dependent on mobility” (65). Drawing on Gernot Böhme and Immanuel Kant, he takes interest in the question of aesthetic judgment in mobile art. I, however, understand ‘aesthetic’ strictly in the original sense without getting into the debate of beauty and art. As we all know, the word ‘aesthetic’ comes from Greek word aisthetikos derived from aisthanomai, meaning “to perceive, feel, sense”. Therefore, I will understand mobile aesthetics throughout this paper, simply as the practice of experiencing through the senses while moving and I am interested in the devices that, by their physical nature, allow this form of perception: wearables.

Miniaturization, which is necessary for portability, generated a new relationship to the body, as Gopinath and Stanyek explain in their Handbook and the devices were historically thought of to be operated and carried by the hand (9). My point is that the devices I study no longer require to go through the hand, the symbol of man’s intelligence and the most important tool, according to Aristotle (1913: §10, 687b, pp. 136-137) but they interact directly with the user’s body and senses, conveniently freeing the hand for other activities and emancipating themselves from the rational distance provided by the tool that is the hand. To take only one example at this point, the smart watch communicates with the user through vibrations on the skin. In this sense notifications the user gets are “pushier” than regular smartphone notifications as they are directly in contact with her and permanently. The smart watch is interesting for the questions this paper raises strictly in the new and different possibilities if offers — possibilities which arise specifically from it’s physical characteristics.

I am interested to find out what this new media evolution towards expended immersion and interactivity, might mean for the human body, for the human identity or human ‘nature’ however problematic this concept is in this somewhat transhumanist instance.

What are wearables?

First of all, wearables constitute an extremely large field of study as we can understand from the very clear and thorough diagram provided by Beecham Research Ltd and WearableTechnologies, AG. (see fig.1, page 15). The technological innovations are mostly occurring in seven different sectors: security and safety, medicine, wellness, sport and fitness, lifestyle computing, communication and finally, glamor.

There has been innovation in portability of listening, viewing and recording devices since the beginning of the 20th century and mapping these evolutions is part of the work Bégin or Gopinath and Stanyek, amongst others, do. The mutations we are experiencing now with smartphones, go pros, drones, iPods etc. are embedded in a history of technological innovation. The same goes for wearables, as some of them evolve in the medical sector as a way to improve health or in the military sector as a way to improve security for instance. I am interested in mobile aesthetics which are resulting from a deeply human desire to improve our senses and create more immersive experiences. In this way, mobile aesthetics exceed all notion of field, sector or even market. This desire is also embedded into history as we can trace the invention of virtual reality back to 1962 with Morton Heilig’s prototype for a

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mechanical multisensory experience (sight, hearing and smell are stimulated simultaneously, see fig.2).

There has been extremely interesting work done on wearables and their implications for self surveillance, auto monitoring, immaterial labour, Big Data, imaginaries being constructed around these technologies etc. and this article very much draws on them. However, my approach differs from them as I focus on how the physical technological characteristics of these devices affect our senses, perception and relationship to our bodies and identities as well as the relationship we have to the bodies and identities of others and to the world in general.

McLuhan writes in the introduction of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man-- the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media” (1964: 3-4).

This quote is at the centre of what we are witnessing with mobile aesthetics and wearables nowadays. They are indeed, the final stage of the extensions of man as they allow the digital and connectivity (‘the internet’) to steadily incorporate the body and stimulate the senses more than ever to finally reach the perception and mind and perhaps change it.

Wearables are indeed very literal extensions of Man.

Weareables as a dispositif?

IPhone screens are getting bigger and bigger to increase reading and viewing comfort almost replacing television and computer in a way. “Access to mobiles is so much more widespread than usage of the World Wide Web that James Katz, for example, suggests the device deserves the subtitle of ‘the real world’s Internet’.” (Snickars and Vonderau, 2012: 296) At the same time apple introduced the Apple smart watch as a smaller more convenient way to access some features the smartphone proposes. Kent Lyons argues that by enabling the access to the same apps as the IPhone, the Apple watch offers the user a “glanceable view of the notification which would otherwise require pulling out a phone. The watch provides improved access time for the notification and enables some quick interactions for simple tasks” (2016: 10). However, he reminds his reader that the smartphone can do better what the watch proposes because it has a “larger interface, faster processors and so on” (11).

Referencing D.L. Ashbrook’s PhD thesis, he argues that the specific characteristics of the watch are not being taken advantage of: the watch is worn over a long period of time. It is an accurate observation, battery time keeps improving, most watches are water proof and offer sleep monitoring apps, thereby erasing any reasons for the wearer to ever take her watch off.

Lyons correctly points out that the smart watch is still being thought of by developers as a peripheral to the smartphone and that notifications are not the right model of use for smart

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watches even if they allow short moments of interaction and improve “short access time” (12). Therefore, he argues for a “watch first strategy” to take advantage of it’s unique physical and technical properties.

Snickars and Vonderau’s book Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media “investigates the iPhone as a media dispositif or apparatus: as emblematizing a radical shift in the relationship among the technological affordances, modes of address, and subject positions that once marked such “old media” as television or cinema” (2012: 7). It is then clear that as soon as wearables’ use arises from their technological characteristics like Lyons advocates, as soon as they are thought of as true dipositifs as opposed to peripherals to the smartphone, they will make the latter an “old media”. My claim is that we are experiencing another kind of radical shift right now with mobile aesthetics.

To make it as clear as possible, I will take a work of art as my first example. During the latest edition of the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam which took place from the 16th to the 27th of November in 2016, the DocLab hosted a number of Virtual Reality short movies. One of them was especially interesting for this paper. Notes on Blindness, is based on writer John Hull’s audio diary he kept while he was turning blind. The immersive experience aims at letting the perceiver experience what it feels like to turn blind and the work of art does conceive virtual reality as a dispositif which is precisely what makes it interesting. Indeed, the perceiver turns her head to ‘look at sounds’, to make it rain on invisible objects which then appear through sounds, she touches the touchpad on the side of the virtual reality gear to blow virtual wind in a specific direction which also makes objects appear through sound.

Just as the invention of dolby surround gave a more immersive experience for movie goers or the WII console and motion sensors meant a more immersive experience and sense of control for gamers, this specific use of the virtual reality dispositif, of it’s technical characteristics, does allow the perceivers to feel more immersed, and even to hear, see, feel things differently and possibly like a blind person would. And it is a highly positive experience. Virtual Reality remains very new and experimental, so it is very difficult not to project ourselves in the future of this ‘next level’ immersive experience but even with a still terribly pixelated image, when the camera rises in the air, anyone would feel like they were flying. It is genuinely that powerful.

However, this striking example of mobile aesthetics belongs to art, which is a praxis. A praxis in Ancient Greek is an action which contains its goal in itself. This paper takes interest in poïesis, an action which doesn’t contain its aim within itself: we paint for the pleasure of it, it is a praxis, and we work to feed ourselves, it is a poïesis. Scientific research is actually moving towards that direction meaning it is focusing on how to use wearables as dispositifs for specific aims (poïesis).

Indeed, Kalantarian and Sarrafzadeh investigated in 2015 how effective a micro phone on the smart watch could be to monitor nutrition. They came to the conclusion the algorithm created managed to distinguish the sound of the user eating an apple from the sound of eating chips for instance. They argue the smart watch algorithm offers better accuracy for the monitoring, unburdens the user and guaranties long term use, as opposed to usual techniques such as 24-7

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diaries or food frequency questionnaires. A lot of the literature on smart watches and wearables in general is focused on medicine or preventing care: detection of seizure, monitoring of patients with diabetes, waking up a driver who is falling asleep, fitness tracking, sleep monitoring etc. The Google eye lenses were patented for medical purposes and are not available in the public market yet (they are aimed at correcting poor vision and measuring the wearer’s glucose levels). This use of smart watches highlighted and studied by the scientists do follow Lyons’s instigation to use the object for it’s physical characteristics (as a dispositif). A smartphone wouldn’t be all the time close enough to record the sounds made by the mouth and the algorithm does take advantage of the fact that the watch is worn over a long period of time.

Moreover, the medium needs to make itself forgotten in order to be effective “as Lisa Gitelman notes, the success of all media relies on our inattention or ‘blindness’ to the media technologies themselves (and all of their supporting protocols) in favour of attention to the phenomena” (Snickars and Vondereau, 2012: 7). In this case, the phenomenon is simply eating. And in general for most wearables, the phenomena would be simply living daily with the wearable or even being (contrary to the media Snickars and Vonderau investigate which provide content). Holding a smartphone or a connected micro phone in front of one’s mouth while eating would make the medium far to visible and would even be cumbersome which would defeat the purpose and make the whole endeavour unsuccessful. It seems reasonable to argue that this specific applied “watch first strategy” has the potential, overtime – and if democratized – to change the way we taste food. We have all experienced not enjoying a certain type of food when we know or are reminded that we should not be eating it. I argue that being recorded by your watch when you eat will affect not only your diet but the taste and enjoyment of the aliments as well when you get used to the ‘digitally induced guilt’ from the biofeedback2. Whether it is for better or worse doesn’t matter here. What I find interesting is that wearable technology, once ‘freed’ from the smartphone, has the potential to change the sense of taste (in this particular case) to an unprecedented extent.

Constantly ‘empowering’ the user Most marketing for wearables is done around the idea to allow the user to take control of her health, diet, fitness, life in general and I’ve tried to demonstrate how one particular example of such practice of mobile and wearable technology can change taste.

However, wearables can also change the way our body feels in space and the relationship we have to said space. It is something we already experience with smartphones for instance.

Specifically regarding navigation, let’s say as a tourist or new resident in an unknown city: the smartphone owner no longer gets lost or wastes time thanks to google maps but the way she understands the city is largely mediated by this blue dot moving on the map. The eyes look down to the smartphone as opposed to upwards to street signs; the fingers ask google for directions as opposed to voicing questions to locals. However convenient, these practices lead to reduced human interactions and to paying less attention to our surroundings. Niels van Dorne in an interesting piece about ‘How Smartphone Technology Impacts Ethnographic

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Research Practice’ writes accurately: “Using my smartphone to locate particular addresses around the city and choose the most appropriate route and mode of transportation to get there was something of an experiential validation of Marshall McLuhan’s well-worn aphorism that media at once extend and amputate certain bodily sense capacities (McLuhan, 1964)” (2013: 388).

A smart watch in this case has similar effects as the smartphone but reality augmented goggles might in fact be more effective and more harmonious with the urban space with a coloured blinking line superimposed on the street you have to turn in, allowing the user to see her surroundings. In a very McLuhanian manner I would argue that wearables are empowering the user effectively but at the same time preventing her from certain human experiences that can prove healthy, like getting lost in a beautiful city, meeting people, or improving her sense of direction.

Wearables are also embodying the user’s subconscious through sleep, which takes one step further McLuhan’s quote I have highlighted earlier in this paper. “Sleep must be bought” (Crary, 2013: 18) but also controlled. And perhaps a consequence of such a need for control will be to its very own nature. An electroencephalographic (EEG) wearable device which will be released in the market soon and very shortly after an extremely successful kickstarter campaign (it received more than 1288% of it’s original funding goal in donations and preorders) launched by tech start-up Arenar. The iband+ offers the users the opportunity to take control of their sleep by experiencing “lucid dreaming” (see fig.3). The technology in this sense aims to integrate the subconscious. Could this ultimately become a new form of psychoanalysis? It is interesting that dreams are still very much incomprehensible for scientists and yet we can manage to control them. Because the digital device allows the users to experience dreaming through audio-visual stimulation without having to consciously use a device with the tool that is the hand, it falls under mobile aesthetics as I understand them in this paper.

For now, the iband+ device worn on the sleeper’s forehead only shines red lights and makes simple sounds to allow the user to be aware she is sleeping without waking her up, but this technology could easily project self-chosen images or play self-chosen sounds as a way of voluntarily manufacturing what I will call a ‘subconscious happiness’. As any connected device, it is also potentially hackable and raises new questions of cyber security. Deuze, in Snickars and Vonderau’s book about the iPhone explains his concept of “Mobile Media Life” and his argument is supported and even overtaken by this technologically very simple audiovisual wearable lucid dreaming device. He writes that we are witnessing a “[…] gradual reworking of a presumably lifeless machine into a generally reproductive yet potentially transformative social tool. Such a perspective reflects a barely implicit emphasis on how media become life – where “become” refers to media extending the communication and conversation capabilities of their users, embedding themselves physically with people through forms of wearable computing, and finally becoming part and parcel of every aspect of daily life and one’s sense of self” (303). It is very clear how controlling one’s subconscious may affect one’s sense of self and overtime – and, once again, if democratized – society as a whole.

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Stimulation of consciousness is already very much democratized and socially accepted.

However, there has been criticism in mainstream and social media about the internet and smartphones as potentially distracting the users in their daily habits whether it’s at work or driving their car. There are a lot of tweets and memes being created about how the internet seems to uncontrollably lead to procrastination. This form of distraction is becoming hard to circumvent. For instance, to give only one of the many examples, a MacBook owner has to actively change the settings of his computer in order to not have Facebook notifications pop up their screen when their Facebook page is closed as the push notification is in the default settings. My argument is that wearables are taking that very real phenomenon to the next level. Imagine your Facebook friends status update popping up directly in your line of view rather than on a screen in your hand or pocket in the case of reality goggles, or vibrating on your arm in the case of smart watches. This is a factual reality and it needs to be addressed even though it hasn’t yet become mainstream mostly because of the price and style of said reality goggles. Like any technological innovation, wearable devices offer new possibilities for empowering ourselves while at the same time providing new opportunities for distraction or psychological changes (we all know the phenomenon of addiction to smartphones and social networks but the psychological consequences of being “online while sleeping” are not yet known).

Open House Day in your neighbour’s mind?

Wearables could affect our sense of self, our relationship to our subconscious but also to others’. There are indeed some examples of wearables that have the potential to alter the way we understand, see, and communicate with each other, via aesthetics or immediate perception. Rain Ashford’s research for instance aims “to investigate whether it is possible to construct new kinds of non-verbal communication using wearable technology devices to amplify and visualise physiological data, in for example, formal and informal social situations”. She focuses “on non-verbal communication, which happens around the body, which includes: gestures, physiological signals from the body in the form of data from sensors, posture, and conveyance of mood or emotion” (100). She establishes a sub category of wearables she calls “emotive wearables” and she takes the example of the EEG Visualising Pendant for use in social situations (see fig. 4) which visualises in LED the brain waves of the wearer and allow her and others to make interpretations about the wearer’s level of concentration and attention (it changes colour and shape).

The second example she takes is the Baroesque Barometric Skirt (see fig.5) which aims to show the wearer’s mood in relation to her environment, via body and general temperature measurements. This kind of technology is also embedded in a history of techniques as we all remember the ring from our childhood which changed colour with different finger temperature and supposedly expressed our mood. As the technology becomes more accurate and democratizes itself (it is starting in Japan for instance where technology is a significant part of the culture), perhaps the universal truth that “The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out” (Leibnitz, 1898: n°7) – meaning roughly that there

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is no way to understand, know or even conceive what goes on in someone’s mind – might not be true anymore. Indeed, Ashford’s examples of emotive wearables show how wearables and mobile aesthetics may (or will) change how we perceive, feel, sense, the other’s emotional being.

This radical shift is true not only for the other’s emotions and concentration level but also for the other’s body. Amelia Keller in an online self published paper refers to Sellen et al.’s paper entitled Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age (2009) to explain this phenomenon: “For example, when touching the person wearing the “Mediated Body” suit, both parties hear “shared soundscape” through their headphones” (2). There, the touch of someone becomes musical. The fact that we can hear someone’s physicality is unprecedented and, ultimately has the potential to absolutely change the relationship we have to the human otherness. It seems only logical that interpersonal wearables should change the relationship we have to others as they change the means we have to perceive their existence. Interactions between human beings therefore become literally technologically mediated, not only through smartphones but in the same space, as the technological intermediary presents itself as clothing, as a second skin. What if the sound produced becomes personalized based on physiological data? What if “emotional/psychological data” and physical data are both taken into account like Keller seems to advocate3 ? What if the sound associated to an individual’s being (personality and body) is unpleasant? There is a lot of speculation to be made for this kind of technology and whether it is exciting or freighting matters little but the change in perception and the possibilities it brings are worth noting.

An eloquent contemporary example of how wearables can affect our relationship to our own body and to the body of others is the development of Virtual Reality in the porn industry.

Pornhub, a pornographic video platform, has invested a lot in the production of 180° and 360° videos and virtual reality gears. They have even partnered with PlayStation to make the immersive experience more interactive (see fig.6). It is clear the Internet has changed masturbation practices significantly and virtual reality is the logical furtherance of these evolutions.

Black Mirror, a dystopian Tech-fi television show created by Charlie Brooker in 2011 depicts a grim picture of what a democratized virtual reality could mean for sexuality in The Entire History of You, the third episode of the first season. In this universe set in the near future, having a ‘grain’ – an implanted device which records everything the owner sees, hears, experiences, and allows her to access these memories directly in her eyes anytime and rewind, pause, zoom in and out or even project them on a screen like a video, with the use of a remote control – has become mainstream. The episode focuses on a young man as he lets his jealousy take control of him and eventually destroy his couple and himself. Around the middle of the episode, a scene shows the couple having sexual intercourse and they are both looking at a memory of themselves having sex in their early days as a couple (see fig.8).

There is a lot of discourse in the media about how smartphones are preventing people from interacting with each other. This is the point the episode makes by taking contemporary

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technology to the absolute extreme. In this case, the mobile aesthetics prevents the protagonists to enjoy each other’s bodies and it is partly their downfall. In the story, the memories are infesting and colonizing the main character’s body and it eventually drives him mad (he sees his wife’s memory of when she cheated on him). After having driven her away, the grain forces him to see her everywhere and he eventually mutilates himself to get rid of the wearable. It is a suffering but also a relief. To a lesser extend, it is exactly the same feeling people experience when they lose their smartphone or when the Wi-Fi is down: it is frustrating to not be able to check Facebook but “wow the sound of a bird singing feels nice”.

Black Mirror shows with this story how technology can alienate the body just by giving the character the possibility to give in to his passions (to be understood in the sense given by Aristotle’s Poetics, as in ‘negative and destructive emotions’) and it is tragic.

The body becomes technology In Black Mirror, the ‘grain’ causes such damage because it is on the eyes of the users and very easy to use. The idea that the body is a great interface is already very much present in our era’s logical thinking. In the introduction of their book Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship – A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment, Château and Moure remind the reader that the screen is a physical “medium aimed at transmitting energy – that is, light”.

Interestingly, we find in the smart watch that, if the front of the screen does transmit light, the back can vibrate, thereby transmitting energy, not through sight but through touch. With the virtual reality gear, the boundary between screen and sound system becomes unclear and blurry, as sound and vision come from the same device placed around the user’s head. The concept of “screen” becomes more and more problematic with wearables as the nature of the energy transmitted differs, as the technology expends its stimulations to other senses than sight and as the practices of wearables involve interactivity.

The human eyes are the best possible screen, this is what Black Mirror represents in its episode The Entire History of You, and there are a number of patents for digital contact lenses (Google, Samsung, Sony). Black Mirror anticipates a kind a virtual reality implanted in the wearer’s neck that projects images on her eyes and sound directly in her brain. But contemporary research has already thought of easier use of the human body. Weigel et al. for instance argue that skin is the best possible interface because it is the largest human organ: “the human skin is recognized as a promising input surface for interactions with mobile and wearable devices” (1). They created iskin: a group of sensors placed on thin silicon which can be placed on the body and that allows users to perform simple actions like answering a call or changing the music they’re listening to. However, it still is at the stage of a peripheral.

There is a privatization of the senses and a capitalist embodiment of the users not only because mobiles aesthetics cause immaterial labour (the users create data for companies and they create demand by constantly being exposed to advertisement), which there has been a lot of great work done by now and which I don’t wish to repeat, but above all because it is literally changing the way we are into the world as human beings. To support this claim, I need to call upon Heidegger’s theory of Modern Technology.

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The philosopher wishes to define the essence of technology and to do so, draws on the Aristotle’s four causes: the material, the formal, the final and the efficient causes. All together, they are a ‘bringing forth’ which reveals something about the object, its truth (aletheia in Greek, meaning literally “non-forgotten” and “reality” as opposed to appearance). But for him, because technology is based on modern physics as an exact science, the efficient cause takes over and therefore technology is not a bringing-forth but a challenging-forth. He argues it is the duty of humanity to reveal the essence of technology. He names the essence of technology “gestell” which translates as enframing and the philosopher defines it as such: “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.

Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological” (1977: 287). In Modern technology (since the industrial revolutions and the invention of the blade wheel which makes use of water), efficiency has become a mode of being in the world. Everything is standing-reserve (for instance: the sun in longer a divinity, the origin of life or god’s creation but a source of energy that needs to be harnessed), including the human being. An eloquent example of this phenomenon is the corporate expression “human resources”: could there be a more straightforward way of expressing the fact that human beings become resources just like everything else?

Wearable devices, I argue, make people resources in a much more ubiquitous way by creating mobile aesthetics. Heidegger never argues that technology is dangerous. What is dangerous is the fact that the essence of technology is unrevealed and it is humanity’s task to reveal it. He believes artists may be able do it. Because technology is a truth, a way of being in relation to the world and each other, it cannot be bad. The consequences of not being able to have a “free relationship” to technology however, can be bad. It is dangerous when the only relation we have to technology is “the will to power” (Nietzsche) over nature and some would argue the environmental crisis we are facing right now is the direct consequence of us not having a free relationship to technology. But the will to power is not technology’s essence according to Heidegger. The reason I’m trying to explain his complicated theory is because “gestell” shows how efficiency is at the centre of the mode of being in relation to the world that is Modern Technology. And to me, mobile aesthetics are at the height of efficiency, capitalizing on every moment of “free time” by stimulating the users’ body.

Virtual Reality – Capitalizing on the air Richard Bégin, in the first lines of his article in the journal Vertigo writes that there was a time where it was impossible to conceive listening to a concert without actually attending it (5). In the same way Jeffrey Martin, a 360° photographer and creator of the spherical, a camera which records 360° videos, makes the very good point in an interview for online magazine Technotopia that for our generation, the online reality is as real as the offline reality of the world. He points out that it would have been very difficult to explain Twitter during the democratization of the Internet in the late 1980s, just as it is very difficult to explain today a world where the digital and the non-digital and where the online and offline

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realities superimpose constantly on our eyes even though it is starting. For him, it should be a reality in fifteen years as we will have developed volume capture. For now, we are indeed able to look everywhere in a completely virtual space but not yet to physically move in it, which volume capture should allow us to do. In Jeffrey Martin’s opinion virtual reality has the power to let the user experience how a space feels like rather than just showing him what it looks like and sounds like. It puts us into a space rather than making us look at one through a screen.

I’m interested in this phenomenon as we see it’s already starting with the Pokemon GO revolution (which has a virtual reality option), or the less successful Type’n’Walk iPhone application which according to Deuze’s description “allows the user to literally never avert her attention from the screen by providing a camera view of the surroundings while texting or e-mailing.” (302). Both those two examples are however still embedded to smartphones at this stage. A number of work of fictions explore what this reality could be like in a decade or two.

And interestingly enough Hyper Reality; a short movie by Keiichi Matsuda, highlights the importance of sex and fitness in this ‘augmented’ reality as we know the human body sells well. The film also shows how social networks and games could colonize the air in front of our faces and the problems of privacy security and hacking an all-digitalised life could convey as the main character being hacked in a super market (and spammed with porn) is extremely worried about losing her ‘points’ (the points are given to her according to her social relations, her work, her purchases etc.). (see fig.9) “As mobile technology continues to integrate the functions of our daily lives, one might argue that mobile devices like the iPhone will no longer be considered devices at all but simply an accepted part of our natural environment.” (Deuze, 298). I claim that this is an effective reality in our era and I would like to shift Deuze’s argument to wearables such as the virtual reality gear. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated (let us remember the social network bought the Oculus Rift in 2012), virtual reality democratization will only be possible when the technology allows the gear to look like a pair of Ray-Ban as a way to bypass the isolation it brings to the user, and also as a way to “look cool” while using it. This is what Black Mirror proposes as well. Thus, when virtual reality gears look like Ray-Bans (or are implanted in our necks), they will be accepted as a part of our natural environment just like the iPhone was.

Conclusion: The work of anticipation Hyper Reality simply shows what it is going to be like when ubiquitous computing is embedded into our lives almost directly on a physiological level: on our eyes, in our arm movements, in our brains. It is not hard to imagine the perpetual exposure to digital advertisement will be a windfall for corporations, as they are cheaper to create than material billboards (whether paper or digital) and more easily transmitted to consumers. Connected, multisensory, augmented reality in a neoliberal world could be the

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ultimate efficient capitalization of our bodies and the air around them; it would be the pinnacle of mobile aesthetics which are already being developed very fast and as I hope to have demonstrated, which are already changing the way we perceive, sense, and feel.

Wearable devices help users to be more and more mobile. Because wearables create new possibilities, they create new needs. Users can know themselves better without having to be bothered by their devices. The medium manages to make itself forgotten by incorporating the user’s body for large periods of time; thereby freeing her hand. Wearables mediate all the more its user’s relationship to her own identity and to her surroundings. I argue that wearables are embedded into a logic of efficiency which started with the industrial revolutions: to collect more data and improve our quality of life, we have to make use of everything – including our bodies and senses, our own subconscious and the emotions and psychology of others.

Because innovation in the field of wearable is exploding at the moment this paper is being written, it is hard not to let oneself speculate about the future. For this reason as well, there is room for research as Mobile Aesthetics can be further explored as soon as a new wearable device is released on the market. And every single one of them surely has the potential to challenge the senses in a new and unique way. The societal and psychological impacts of those devices, should be studied thoroughly if (or when) they become democratized in a couple of years. There is also an urgent need of questioning what happens to all the data collected from more and more efficient and ubiquitous wearables. A number of ethical question are also to be raised when it comes to psychological and emotional data as for now only physiological data is being stored and used by large companies and we seem to have accepted to give up this type of personal information in exchange for fitness tracking and sleep monitoring.

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Figure 1 in Wei, Joseph. “How Wearables Intersect with the Cloud and the Internet of Things: Considerations for the developers of wearables.� IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine 3.3 (2014): 54. Provided by Beecham Research, Ltd and WearableTechnologies, AG.

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Figure

2: Sensorama patent by Morton Heilig, 1962

Figure 3: The iBand+ for lucid dreaming, by Arenar, facebook video published by Unilad on October 5th, 2016

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Figure 4 “EEG Visualising Pendant for use in social situations”, in Ashford, Rain.

“Responsive and emotive wearables: devices, bodies, data and communication.” Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Adjunct Program. ACM, 2014 (101)

Figure 4 “The Baroesquevirtual Barometric in Figure 6 Pornhub's realitySkirt”, partnership with Ashford, “Responsive and emotive wearables: PlayRain, Station 4. For a description of the virtual devices, bodies, data and communication.” reality pornographic experience, see : Proceedings of the 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

ACM v=kWzm5QhSO9U&oref=https%3A%2F International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Adjunct Program. ACM, 2014. (103) %2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch %3Fv=kWzm5QhSO9U&has_verified=1

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Mobile aesthetics, an effective wearable appropriation of the senses

Figure 8 Screenshot – “The Entire History of You”, Black Mirror Season 1 episode 3, Channel 4, December 18, 2011. 22'34

Figure 9 Hyper Reality, a short film by Keiichi Matsuda, May 2016, on vimeo https://vimeo.com/166807261

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Mobile aesthetics, an effective wearable appropriation of the senses

Figure 9 bis Hyper Reality, a short film by Keiichi Matsuda, May 2016, on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/166807261

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1 Notes: For a study on how smartphone use changes the user’s posture and cause neck pain, see for instance: Kim, Man-Sig. "Influence of neck pain on cervical movement in the sagittal plane during smartphone use." Journal of physical therapy science 27.1 (2015): 15.

2 ‘Biofeedback’ is a term I am borrowing from Gopinath and Stanyek’s chapter entitled “Tuning the Human Race: Athletic Capitalism and the Nike+ Sport Kit” in the book by Georgina Born Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (2015: 128-148). Biofeedback is “defined as the voluntary control of autonomic functions for the purpose of achieving a healthy state of homeostasis” (135).

3 Keller indeed argues that contemporary personal technologies dehumanize us because they provide a temporary distraction instead of letting us deal with our emotions. For individuals to understand themselves fully, the “Quantified Self” applications would need to include psychological data. “This would provide humans with a greater understanding of their sense of self.” (1). She refers to a study by Niels van Berkal et al. Entitled The Curse of the Quantified Self, an Endless Quest for Answers. This study finds that to help quantified selfers to “take a proactive stance to collect and act upon their personal data” (an aim by which they are defined), there should be one unified application to analyse all this data from different devices and to take psychological data into account. For Keller, only this unification of all data, can prevent the dehumanization of users (‘perceivers’). She also adds quite naturally: “Furthermore, it would be interesting if people could voluntarily share this information to help people understand others on a greater scale. Understanding our own and others emotions could be very beneficial to us as a species.” This statement takes Foucault’s concept of biopower to a whole other level in the era of neuroscience wherein we are starting to understand emotions and psychology in the realm of physics…

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Ashford, Rain. “Responsive and emotive wearables: devices, bodies, data and communication.”

Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Adjunct Program. ACM, (2014: 99-104).

Bégin, Richard, L’image au corps in Vertigo, n° 48 “Images et visions mutantes”, Paris (2015).

Bégin, Richard, GoPro: Augmented Bodies, Somatic Images in Chateau, Dominique and Moure, José (dir.) Screens, Amsterdam University Press B.V. (2016).

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Lyons, Kent "Smartwatch Innovation: Exploring a Watch-First Model", IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 15, no., pp. 10-13, Jan.-Mar. 2016, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2016.21 McLuhan, Marshall. "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: The New American Library." (1964).

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Online references: Keller, Amelia, Humanizing Wearables, Rochester Institute of Technology: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54342ec1e4b0b9afe439a21a/t/56d7a24a20c647a0f86e3aa6/ 1456972399038/Amelia+Keller+-+Humanizing+Wearables.pdf Leibniz,

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http://philosophy.eserver.org/leibniz-monadology.txt Martin, Jeffrey interviewed by John Biggs for Technotopia “360-degree camera maker Jeffrey Martin talks

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http://technotopia.cc/2016/05/27/technotopia-017-with-jeffrey-martin/ The Google Inc. patent for “Intra-ocular device”, by Conrad, Andrew Jason (Malibu, CA), filed October 24, 2014: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2016/0113760.html