Brian Rush - Mirror Masks, 2011

Brian Rush - Bench, 2011

Pantalaine - Provisioners of America's Finest Plural Clothing, 2005

'Advertised' in Issue 17 of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, I'm not sure if the website/joke predates its appearance in the magazine or if it existed prior.  Nor am I sure who is responsible for Pantalaine.

Jamie Isenstein - Arm Chair, 2006

While not activated as a relational prosthetic, since it exists as a performance/sculpture rather than as an interaction between artist/chair and audience/potential-participant, Arm Chair nevertheless could be one and is therefore worth considering.

From the artist's gallery portfolio:

David Cross - Re-Tard, 2007

All images and text from the artist's website:

3 Photographs, Assorted Sculptural Objects, Performance.

Re-tard examines the relationship between, [sic] abstraction, children’s recreational structures and the grotesque.. Utilising commercially manufactured canvas props set up as a tableaux in the gallery space, the work consists of two modes, an opening performance and a subsequent interactive installation.  Three large coloured panels are positioned diametrically across the gallery space.  The panels have slots where my body and the bodies of the performers penetrate the surface.  Each panel has two air holes where an assortment of attachable components can be fitted or removed.  As in a children’s fun house, the audience are encouraged to manipulate the pieces by attaching or removing individual components.  As well as the tableaux of objects, three large-scale photographs of the panels with my body positioned inside them are located on the gallery walls..Re-tard picks at the blurry edges of abstraction where formal concerns intercede with the popular languages of infantile play structures.

David Cross - Pump, 2009

I first encountered an image of this piece in a printed advertisement for the artist's university's art program and was struck by the similarity to my box piece.  Having fallen in love with inflation as a metaphor and as a strategy to activate the viewer when I first saw images of Lee Bul's Hydra II (Monument), 1999, I naturally loved Cross's use.

All images, video and quotes are from his website:

David Cross is an artist, writer and curator based in Wellington, New Zealand

Working across performance, installation, video and photography, Cross has focused on the relationship between pleasure, the grotesque and the phobic.  His small to large-scale performance/installation work has sought to incorporate and extend contemporary thinking in relation to participation, linking performance art with object-based environments.  Often using his own body as a starting point, he employs a range of objects--many of which are inflatable--to draw audiences into potentially unexpected situations and dialogues.

Move: Choreographing You

The exhibition, Move: Choreographing You, opening today (October 13, 2010) at The Hayward Gallery in London, showcases several relational prosthetics.  Artists who have made RPs (or work that lies just outside my definition of a relational prosthetic) include: Franz Erhard Walther, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris and Franz West.

The promotional/viral video below features pieces Number 31 and 48 of Franz Erhard Walther's Werksatz series.


Via

Krzysztof Wodiczko et al. - Dis-Armor, 1999-2000

Dis-Armor Project:Krzysztof Wodiczko, Adam Whiton, Sung Ho Kim, Jurek Stypulkowski, Brooklyn Model Works

From the website of MIT's Interrogative Design Group:

Dis-Armor is the newest in a series of psychocultural prosthetic equipment designed to meet the communicative need of the alienated, traumatized, and silenced residents of today's cities. It connects contemporary research in two fields: wearable communication technology and prosthetics. In doing so, it counters the dichotomy of the present explosion in communication technology and rampant cultural miscommunication. 

Dis-Armor offers an opportunity for indirect, mediated communication by allowing its users to speak through their backs. LCD screens, worn on the back, display live images of the wearer's eyes transmitted from cameras installed in the helmet covering the face. A speaker positioned below the LCD screens amplifies the user's voice. Attached to the helmet is a rearview mirror, alternatively, a rearview video camera, monitor, microphone, and headphone. These permit the user to see the face and hear the words of the spectator/interlocutor standing behind. Wireless video equipment installed in the helmet further allows two users to work in tandem, showing each other the other's eyes and broadcasting to each the other's voice. 

Specifically, Dis-Armor is an instrument designed to focus on the psychological difficulties of Japanese high school students and "school refusers," who live in silence and lack facial expression. It uses the ancient traditions of arms making to conceive of a playful alternative to intimidating face-to-face communication. It is designed for particular individuals among urban youth who have survived overwhelming life events (violence, neglect, and abuse) and who now wish to overcome their false sense of shame, to break their silence, and to communicate their experience in public space.

Keetra Dean Dixon (FromKeetra) - Just Between You and Me: Objects of Co-dependency, 2008

Just Between You and Me, 2008

Again, some of these operate on more of a symbolic level than an experiential one but are worth considering regardless.

All images and info taken from the designer's website [new link], except the balloon demo below, which came from Design Boom.

Keetra Dean Dixon (FromKeetra) - To-gather Together series

http://fromkeetra.com/posts.php?post=091

My evolving definition sees relational prosthetics (RPs) as straddling the boundary between generating symbolic meaning and facilitating participatory experience.  Assuming that the All-i-pops are not to be actually consumed, knowing that the hat/shoes piece (How about a little support?!) is near impossible to use, and seeing that the connected shirts piece (3shirt ---> Dress for the occasion) and the phone (Earphone) are likely meant only to be looked at, these pieces by FromKeetra are moving more toward the symbolic end of the spectrum.

Keetra Dean Dixon (FromKeetra) - Anonymous Hugging Wall, 2008

An edition in the ongoing series METHODS & APPARATI for Social Facilitation and Mood Elevation.

All images and information from the artist's website.

Jenny LC Chowdhury - Intimate Controllers (in progress)

All images and info from the artist's website.  Her practice:

My work is the bastard child of an engineering education, a suppressed desire to be an artist and an unwavering interest in pranks. I suppose that means that my work has three parents. 

Whether in the form of a website, installation, cellphone application or a performance, my projects call attention to how technology has altered the ways in which people communicate with each other and their surrounding environment. A New York City native, my work often involves applying and manipulating technology in the bustling cityscape of which i am so fond.  

I'm currently finishing my masters' work at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and hope to continue producing thought provoking, amusing work.

Intimate Controllers:
In development, Intimate Controllers, in its current manifestation allows two participants to play a simple video game whose play is similar to Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero except that the control interface is embedded in undergarments.  Each player's controller is worn by the other and as the game progresses each participant touches their partner in increasingly intimate areas.

Communications (Alex McLean and EunJoo Shin) - Microphone, 2010

http://issuu.com/tintarts/docs/unleashed_devices_catalague [sic]

Stumbled upon this piece through some random clicking on facebook: photo of a friend of an acquaintance, below.

Microphone is Communications [sic] first work making its debut at Unleashed Devices, and providing [sic] a means of oral, yet pre-linguistic communication.  Mouthed vowels are transmitted across the gallery between participants, so that physical symbolic connections are felt between sound and movements of the mouth, free from lexical constructs.

Helmets - Prototype1 Documentation

Matthias Gommel - Delayed, 2002

From Medien Kunst Netz:

Two Headsets are hanging from the ceiling. Microphones record speach which can be heard via the head phones. Both sets are linked so that one can hear the other speaker. The communication, however, is realized with a three second delay. The perception of one's own act is being detached from its execution. All perception of the world is in a way with a time delay, made perceivable through this transparent delay.

Presented in the context of the exhibition «Son Image» at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, 2003.

Relational Prosthetics - Working Definition #1

Any physical object/interface whose primary function is to initiate and/or facilitate a face-to-face interaction/encounter--or at least a physically proximal engagement--between two or more people.


Some terms/phrases for further consideration (many taken from the quote from the previous post on Walther):


-active manipulation
-simple-use items
-"the sum of the object and the activation by the viewer...constituted the whole sculpture or work."

Franz Erhard Walther - Werksatz No. 1 (First Workset), 1963-69

Franz Erhard Walther, Für Zwei (Nr. 31, 1.Werksatz) [For Two], 1967.
Courtesy of fe walther foundation+archives and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York.

 From What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art:

When he began Werksatz No. 1 (First Workset) in 1963, Franz Erhard Walther created objects from fabric or other industrial materials that were intended to be brought to life by a spectator's active manipulation.  Often resembling simple-use items such as clothing, slippers, bags, pockets, and satchels, the objects offered a range of variation and playfully set off an engagement with distance, loseness, time, dimesions, and body language.  In Walther's conception, all of the components of the orkset existed to be played, worn, moved, carried, or lifted depending on the circumstances of the project.  Sometimes the works were desgned for one person at a time, sometimes several people were needed, but in each case, it was the sum of the object and the activation by the viewer that constituted the whole sculpture or work.

 http://www.cacbretigny.com/inhalt/few.html

        Walther's work offers a model for understanding the shifting role of audience participation in the process and meaning of contemporary art.  By utilizing skills required to give visual form to intellectual and emotional experience, it provides and arena for understanding how 'process' is art.  Once viewers are physically involved, they cease to be spectators and become participants (and thus a portion of the sculptures).  For Walther, this did not mean that the person/sculpture became an object; on the contrary, they remained a subject, just as the work came alive and was given bodily form. 

While Walther is clearly coming from a sculpture background and addressing/challenging issues native to that realm, the pieces in Werksatz No. 1 that involve more than one person align almost perfectly with my working definition of a relational prosthetic.  Some of his pieces also bear a striking resemblance to some of my own work.  Having learned of their existence after creating my first relational prosthetics (I'm thinking here especially of my Box intervention), it was exciting to find someone who had addressed face-to-face encounters in a somewhat similar formal manner.

Franz Erhard Walther « 1.Werksatz », 1963-1969 58 objects, Sockel, 1969 Exhibition view: Living currency, Tate Modern, London, 2007 Photos by Sheila Burnett.  From http://www.galeriewolff.com/site/artists_detail.php?uid=17&image_id=3