Prosthetic Ass ( Latteier , 2000 )
audience / Article by Jonah Brucker - Cohen
In the human beings of originative interventions into popular engineering , projects that make us wonder how we consume and practice digital devices are often those that maintain our attending . Using this credo as a start point , Toronto , Ontario - based creative person , Amos Latteier create workplace that explore the lighter side of technology . Poking fun at everything from embodied package presentation with his PowerPoint carrying out to create homebrew prosthetic limbs with the Prosthetic Ass , his work examines the subtlety of DIY refinement and the possible emotional impact of simple equipment . Re - purposing consumer electronics in imaginative ways , his task , Calculator Haikus , creates poetry from upside - down calculator displays to emphasize how a playful approach can often yield unexpected effect . On the software side , his inquisitive PowerPoint public lecture engage the vapid presentation software to create cockeyed relationships between witness and utterer . Gizmodo catch up with up with Latteier to discuss his artistic practice , originative philosophy , and aim to infuse mild silliness into standardized teaching methodologies and aggregate - acquire software program and ironware . consultation and photos after the startle …
Name : Amos Latteier
Age : 35
breeding : BA Brown University , expend out of a MFA program at SFSU
tie : independent artist
URL : http://www.latteier.com/
GIZMODO : How did you first become interested in work up mechanized objective ?
AL : I wish to instruct myself thing and to experiment . That say , I am not a craftsman , and I ’m not very good at work up thing . Like most people , I have a lot of stupid idea , but what makes me different from most people is that I sometimes have the time and energy to seek and come after those theme up . Most of the machines that I ’ve ramp up have the flavor of humorous and low - tech gamey school scientific discipline projects . In increase to building machine , I also do PowerPoint execution . In both practices I am drawn to ideas of teaching and learning , humor , and an idiotic and affirmative inventiveness .
GIZMODO : Your project , “ The Prosthetic Ass ” , ( which uses a chainsaw motor as a walk economic aid ) is an interesting input on the manipulation of electric devices as human assistance in public space . What were you trying to achieve with the projection ?
AL : This project is based on a cartoon depicting a machinelike “ prosthetic tail end ” in the 1978 rule book on cybernetics , “ Robots On Your threshold : A Book About Thinking Machines ” . The toon expressed to me the excitement and fatuousness of a walking cybernetic haversack . I also liked the wordplay of arse as donkey and ass as butt . I wanted to see if such a auto could be built , and what would happen when the pun was made physical . It turn out to be a severe and clumsy motorcar that could n’t really carry much weight . However it did make a big dab at the skill fair where I first demoed it . mirthfully it did n’t hurt anyone .
500 lb Potato Battery ( Latteier , 2000 )
GIZMODO : With “ 500 lb . Potato Battery ” , you hooked up 500 pound . worth of the vegetables to a small sound system . What was the impetus behind this project and did it actually function the way you intend it to ?
AL : For this undertaking , I take aim a well - known grade schoolhouse scientific discipline experiment and boast it up to a huge shell . Originally I wanted to employ the murphy to heat oil to make French nestling , but I could n’t get nearly enough vigor out of them for that . I terminate up have them make sound when a friend offered to carry my project around in the back of a U Haul hand truck . stimulate the potatoes make sound turn out to nicely accompany the experience of exploring the potatoes in the enclosed space of the back of the truck . One job with the task was that the electrical connections between the potato were very delicate , so when the truck off a chuckhole I had to pass a long sentence finding shorts and fixing the wiring . Another pitiful part of the labor is that the white potato were translate inedible by being used as a stamp battery , so I could n’t eat them at the end of the projection .
Call of the Wild ( Latteier , 2004 )
GIZMODO : In “ Call of the Wild ” , you were attempting to use the cellular telephone phone as an enabling engineering for audio nature tours . How important is the use of mobile devices in instinctive environments ?
Camellia State : This project has more cogitate behind it than some of the others that I ’ve done . I love pigeons and other urban wildlife and I desire to make a project to serve people learn about and appreciate these animals . I also wanted to address the room in which people and animals are link by wander together human history and natural history . Cell headphone were a great choice for a few reason . jail cell telephone are very like to audio tour machine . Many people already have them , so this projection made use of engineering without postulate me to build anything . Finally , cell phone are unremarkably used to take people away from their surroundings , so it was fun to create a way to employ them to connect people to their environment . you could listen to the audio tours on my vane site .
Calculator Haikus ( Latteier , 2000 )
GIZMODO : “ Calculator Haikus ” takes the simple display of the figurer and make haikus from the upside down display . What are you seek to say about the simplicity of engineering ?
AL : This project comes from my memories of spelling HELL ( 7734 ) and BOOBIES ( 5318008 ) using calculators in midway schooling . I wondered what other words could be spelled , so I wrote a very simple computer computer program to check the dictionary . It turns out that there are about 100 words . Given this unknown and modest mental lexicon , I wonder what could be write . The obvious option of text was haiku , since they are so unretentive . The project explores what happens when you campaign a stupid calculator thaumaturgy as far as it can go . I really enjoy the fun ways that people can misuse everyday technologies .
30 Minute Hovercraft ( Latteier , 2000 )
GIZMODO : 30 Minute Hovercraft was an experiment in building a ground-effect machine from cardboard and a vacuum cleaner in under an hour . What was your impetus for building this task ?
Alabama : This labor is basically just a high school day scientific discipline labor presented as artistic creation . In fact , I did n’t in the beginning cogitate of it as prowess . At first it was just something sport do to with my roomie ’s shop vac . At the fourth dimension I lived in a warehouse so there was lots of room to ride a ground-effect machine . Then I buy a leaf blower and get down require the ground-effect machine to party . As you could think , it was quite a collision . by and by I entered it in an art show mostly because they were only accept two - dimensional nontextual matter , and most of what I had was sculpture . I figured that if you hung the hovercraft to the wall it could count as two - dimensional .
GIZMODO : What projects are you presently work on ? How are they like or dissimilar than your retiring projects ?
AL : One projection that I ’m currently working on is a telephone set labor where hoi polloi use the sound like a karaoke machine to record their own protestation songs to the melodic line of Twisted Sister ’s “ We ’re Not Gon na Take It ” . you may record songs about serious things like the warfare in Iraq , or stuff like how your landlord wo n’t ever remediate stuff . Then you may opt politicians to send your song to . This works because most political leader have comment demarcation where you could leave them messages about your concerns . The project will also have a website where you may listen to song that people have record .
Another project I ’m working on is a performance about the story of zoological garden architecture . I ’m really interested in a guy rope discover Karl Hagenbeck who revolutionized menagerie computer architecture betimes in the Twentieth Century . He popularized the use of goods and services of fosse rather than bar , and showed animals in naturalistic preferences . I want to compare this history with many other thing include the videogame Microsoft Zoo Tycoon , and this chronicle of animals in film . I ’m really concerned in how space for animal presentation have evolve over the last century .
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