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:

An Intimate Transaction, Between Two People With No History and No Future

Sarah Zarr in her short essay, "Something for the Pain," about her trip to the physiotherapist's office:

"The claustrophobic space, and us so close in it, made me want to giggle or crack a joke.  But I remained dignified and managed to act like people ask to touch my hips every day."

and

David Cross - Bounce, 2006

All images, video and text from the artist's website:

Bounce is a one day performance/installation that explores the relationship between pleasure, danger and the uncanny.  Over a seven-hour period the audience are invited to engage/interact with a large inflatable children’s play structure.  The leisurely ambience of the work is recast however by the unforeseen presence of the artist.  Two small eyeholes on the top of the structure reveal a body inside watching the audience from within.  The relational enjoyment of the work is recast by this uncanny moment of uncertainty when play is interrupted by a fragmentary live presence.  Bounce is a performance/intallation that renegotiates the artist/audience relationship mixing conviviality and recreation with violence and phobia.  it navigates a space between the real and fantasy linking the visceral transgression of body art with languages of everyday gratification.

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 and Sung Ho Kim (Interrogative Design Group) - Porte-Parole, 1993

Artist statement (and all images) from Interrogative Design Group's website:

The Porte-Parole Mouthpiece is an instrument for strangers, its function is to empower those who are deprived of power.

This object encircles the jaw with a small video monitor and loud speakers placed directly over the wearer’s mouth, showing the lips moving in sync to the prerecorded narrative. It is designed to replace the hesitations and fearful silent of an immigrant’s personal voice with a fully formed version of the immmigrant’s story. It function both as a conduit of ones' voice and image as well as a gag that blocks the mouth and prevents from speaking.

Porte-Parole transforms its user into a virtual subject, literally, a cyborg communicating through a high-tech device rather than your own bodily apparatus for speech. The small size screen drives viewers to come closer to the user face in order to see the image of the moving lips and hear the voice.

Exhibited in 'Xenology: Immigrant Instruments, 1992-1996' ,Galerie LeLong NYC, 1996.

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.

Theatre Replacement - Box Theatre and BIOBOXES, 2007 - current

Theatre Replacement is a Vancouver-based theatre company that "tends to engage with biographical examinations, relationship to audience and space and explorations of unique and challenging ways of exploring content and staging material."  


+++

Box Theatre is a collection of six one-person shows for one-person audiences. In each performance, actor and audience share a small box worn on the actor's shoulders. Using a combination of text, tiny props and a little magic, actor and audience engage in the most intimate of performance experiences. Working with Theatre Replacement artistic directors and local artisan Minoru Yamamoto, 6 actor/creators developed their independent stories and boxes. The new works were first performed at the Firehall Arts Centre and then subsequently altered to fit an outdoor festival setting. Box Theatre was commissioned by The Powell Street Festival, and featured the talents of some of Vancouver's most adventurous theatre makers: Adrienne Wong, Spencer Herbert, Kris Nelson, and Camille Gingras. 

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.

Everyday (ie. non-art) Relational Prosthetics?

Helmets - Prototype1 Documentation

My Early Hunch/Interest - Toward a Thesis Proposal

Extracted from an email to my thesis advisor/committee:

Here’s what I’m thinking.  As you may remember, I call my current body of work Relational Prosthetics, which I define tentatively as 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 [also see here].  There is (at least) a smattering of such objects/artworks that fit this description in a fine art context throughout today’s contemporary art world and recent history (I don’t think I would look much earlier than 1960…maybe see if the Dadaists did anything of the sort?).  Without suggesting that these items ought necessarily comprise a new subgenre of interactive sculpture or performance (or whatever other genre or art field) I would like to consider these as a group to see what might be said about them.

I'd actually like to retract, for now, the qualification "Without suggesting that these items ought necessarily comprise a new subgenre..."  It's too early to rule that out.  The sculptors, performance artists, thespians, musicians and film-makers/writers have arrived at similar objects from very different disciplines; maybe it would be profitable to link them with a common appelation so they are not isolated by their originating disciplines that they can't speak to each other.

I would tentatively call this group by the same moniker I’m using for my own work, relational prosthetics, but would be open to revising the label as my research requires.  I would do/give a cursory survey of various artworks by various artists (Franz Erhard Walther, Lygia Clark, Robert Morris, Valie Export, and more recent artists such as David Cross, Miranda July, Erwin Wurm [Rotozaza, Krysztof Wodiczko, Maya Suess, Matthias Gommel, Lucky Dragons] etc.) briefly comparing their apparent aims and means.  I would also draw on other disciplines (such as the sociological and anthropological thought of Erving Goffman and Edward Hall, the extended aesthetics of Katya Mandoki, and the theological perspective of Martin Buber [also, the theory of medical prosthetics, and Marshall McLuhan's thinking on 'the extensions of man'])  to suggest new ways of talking about what these art works do.  A tentative title for the paper would be something like Relational Prosthetics: towards a vocabulary of object enabled (and constrained) interpersonal engagement in art.

 

I am confident that the topic is pertinent not only to my own practice but, if done well, could be important to current discourse surrounding relational aesthetics and the burgeoning field of social practice.  While many of the works discussed would not typically be identified with these realms of the art world they nevertheless have much in common, and their unique mixture of materiality and relationality places them in the potentially bridge-building position straddling the object-centered studio/gallery paradigm and the more ephemeral, immaterial realm of social practice.  

The next paragraph was put in parentheses because I was unsure about its relevance.  I think I expressed well enough that I will likely not address the issue(s) directly and I still feel that way. Consequently I am now working on better articulating the importance of this research 

(Claire Bishop, in her important essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” registers one of the more legitimate complaints against discursive art.  She claims, rightly that aesthetic concerns have been hijacked by political and moral ones.  Not that there is anything inherently wrong with such aims but she claims that critics and audiences have given these works a sort of free pass aesthetically because they have good intentions.  I view this objection to current social practice as one of the more serious complaints that needs to be addressed, and while I am not entirely sure my thesis will address the issue head on, I suspect that developing a vocabulary around these art works that straddle the aesthetic and social realms might offer a hint of a way forward.  At the very least my paper and the collected works being referred to as relational prosthetics could serve as an entry point to relational art for critics and audiences more accustomed to traditional static arts.)

At times I fear that my scope is too broad, that I’m taking on too much for a one-year process.  So I’m writing to see what you think.  Am I right to have reservations?  Do you think the topic is a good one?  Would you shift the focus much?  Can you help me think about possible methodologies?  

Another reservation I have--or a potential weakness of this project--is the fact that I have little to no direct participatory experience with any of the artworks in question.  Is this an insurmountable weakness?  How can I tailor the project to accommodate this unfortunate and (in the short term) irremediable problem?

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

social practice blurb

From Portland State University's Art and Social Practice MFA website:

Social practice might appear to be more like sociology, anthropology, social work, journalism, or environmentalism than art, yet it retains the intention of creating significance and appreciation for audiences in a similar way to more conventional art.