The /dev/null Doll
Running time: continuous / live audio composition / interactive performance installation / place of reflection /

The /dev/null Doll: Afflictions of matter, perceptual shifts and abjection... /dev/null is a special UNIX file where you pipe your uwanted data flow to this output. When I first experienced viewing data disappearing into this file, I was so impressed that I had a wonderful vision of how theories around the black hole might function in an every day context of social abjection. So I made a /dev/null doll and embedded it with light and sound sensors. This installation focuses on the spatiality of sensory perception and human engagement with embedded sensor technologies with a specific reference to abjection.
I make connections to Julia Kristeva and her theory of abjection (1982), where expressions of abjection are social taboos commonly censored in the public sphere, redirected by society to a type of collective /dev/null/.

The /dev/null Doll is a site where your excess is articulated and contravened. I merge sensor technologies and the neural system of the body. Place your hand on the heart and whisper into the microphone, this action of covering the heart of the doll triggers a light sensor to record. A transformation process begins where potentially dangerous emotions are released and converted from analogue to digital, in order to allow re-coding session to begin. See techmap but in general Puredata software processes this excess energy and sound which is amplified in the space.

Just like vacuum polarization occurs near a black hole, the signals of the microphone on the wires, picks up the voice and the light sensor is programmed to record as soon as it monitors darkness. Vibration, human activity feeds through this network of software wires and microphones, creating changing sound states from transformed energy. Confrontation and the reintegration of excess can be transformative, personally and socially liberating and empowering also actual sound has the ability to profoundly influence an individuals brain waves, respiratory cycles, nervous system, muscle function, heart rate and glandular function.

The /dev/null Dollis /dev/null is an abyss, a null point where you output your unwanted data flow. I am interested in providing an object that transmorms feeling, the murk, and provides a great mixture in output of sound. In a sense The dev/null Doll is the threshold, the event hoizon of the black hole. The person first moves at their usual speed towards the sigularity of the doll, then slowing stops at the event horizon, symbolised by the heart, when at the heart area, where the microphone and light is placed, they are encompassed by the doll, where on oberservation the visitor to the doll slows down. Apparently the event hoizon is a light-like surface that causes the apparent slow down of the infalling observer.

Be careful when you wrestle with monsters, lest you thereby become one. For, if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you. Friedrich Nietsche

Sound clips from The /dev/null Doll

sample 1# ogg

sound sample 2 # ogg

sound sample 3 # mp3

Image slide show of The /dev/null doll ENABLE JAVASCRIPT

Movie of users in action Qtime

A microphone is placed in the heart of the large doll object. This microphone is a 'voice changer' this picks up the voice this is connected via mini jack to the computer where Lisa and JunXion softwares process this excess energy and sound which is amplified in the space via speakers. (next version of the doll at Rotterdam Worm Studios will be done in Pure Data) Audio delays process all the signals via the software first inorder to avoid massive build up. This is a modified version of the voice processor, programmed by Franke Blade from Steim. The light sensor is programmed to record as soon as it monitors darkness. This is connected to a junXion Box which is to my computer via USB. Attached to the microphone is a tiny speaker. This is cupped with a ressonance chamber and placed in the mouth of the doll.

Operation Manual

TECH MAP

Keep in mind while watching the doll that due to the kinesthetic nature of interactivity the /dev/null doll is best perceived through use. A bystander can imagine how it would be like by watching others being engaged, but it is only through actual use that interactivity is fully experienced and felt.

In the confort of large figure you may reflect and off-load your excess energy. It is always helpful to project unwanted thoughts and emotions into the large consuming abyss, rather than onto the other people around you. Perhaps it is things that you are unable to articulate or just general energetic frustration. The sound ebbs and flows in and out of the space. I use delays and repetition to give a sense of energy or momentum, also this adds to the intensity of the object of the doll in order to emphasise the relentless nature of ones trauma, or unfinished business that returns, repeats, replays in the nervous system of oneself. This doll mirrors your fragments of text. The whisper you place inside the dolls heart, this is where the microphone is placed and which on covering a light sensor is triggered to record.
After leaving the doll, you are shed with light.

After reading the basic instructions. The sound is first composed in the mind of the user as analogue, outputted, performed, deconstructed into digital format. This all feeds into a central processing unit, where the software performs a live composition composition of these recordings and heavy manipulations of the whisper. since the conscious mind represses most horrors, however they still exist beyond the imaginary border between the self and that which is too terrible to consciously acknowledge, however the are still playing somewhere in our interiority, in our bodys nervous system.

WEARABLE BODY ORGANS
"A series of very visible, spectacular, or even bizarre play-use objects-devices-equipment that both offer context sensitive functionality for their wearers and simultaneously announce their own needs for existence by being used in public without being hidden and small, as is the trend with consumer gadgets and self-helping devices, hearing aids, PDAs, prostheses, and artificial organs. They are designed for playful and serious creativity. Key in their functionality is that they are critical social activists. Each apparatus acts to call reflexive attention to the social repression addressed by the very need for the existence of the device."

DOUBLE BUBBLE This is an installation to "offer humans the possibility to lend their brainwaves to a robot and control its electrical servos. Operators assist and guide the process these women are in the mid-term of their pregnancy, chosen for an understated yet emphatic presence. The electrical brain signals of the participants are captured by electroencephalograms sensors placed on their forehead. Eleven robotic movements such as change of direction, path, pace and "body language" is dictated by the electrical neuro-physiological processes of the participant′s brain in real time." Double Bubble 2#description

CLANDESTINE TRANSMISSIONS OF PIRATE JENNY This lady knows that all listening and longing folds into itself and that meaning can be derived from static, the delirium of crossed signals and amplified interference

ALLAN LAMB
Im very inspired by his "infinite music machines" and use of pulsating magnetic fields to vibrate hair-fine tantalum wires carrying electric currents where he records amplified upper harmonics of metal wires activated by wind.

PHROQ
Uses a strange technique of contact microphones, metal wires and beer cans, explores a new sound universe, a serious work (by the form and will) but also a funny way (by technique) of the experimental electro-acoustic and noise music.

Voodoo poppets
Making these Dolls is generally aimed at containing a hostile force, rather than destroying it. It is a simple and a very powerful form of spell working. "The practice of sticking pins in "voodoo dolls" has history in healing teachings as identifying pressure points. European-based magical devices such as the "poppet" and the nkisi or bocio of West and Central Africa.

Mp3 Here is an excerpt where a live composition recording voices was applied at SIDESHOW MODERN / MEDIA DIVINATION sisterO and Expavatar

Possible Further Development

Make the /dev/null doll child proof and more stable, contain the wires find a way of operating the doll with out the need for batteries. Solider a power pack on to the voice changer and a cover on the junXion box.

On a next simple next step would that I'd like to do some Audio STREAMING As a streamed live as a broadcast
I'd probably use this advice from the Streaming Suitcase.

ThejunXion Box allows you to connect up to 8 analogue sensors, 16 switches, and 2 channels of ultrasound. I would like to include more interactive possibilites that react to particular tones of the voices. I'd also like to have a live recorded database. Carefully placed to record both the voices and the movement in aproprioceptive manner I'd like to trigger sound from a human encephalogram. As I am also pretty interested in attention architecture where in real time the electrical signals of your brains control the electrical servos of a robot to respond to the needs of your bodily system.

A very strange but beautiful examples of far off connection and possibilities between new sensor technologies, everyday healing and art. Early Radio and Scientific Apparatus neural system and the living cell One can draw deep parallels between neural system and the living cell, presented as massively interconnected array of catalytical chemical processes – virtually similar to neural network. The studies of near critical metal vapours at high pressure and temperature were continued as well. New phase transitions were discovered together with anomalous behaviour of the sound velocity.