Abler was run by Sara Hendren between 2009 and 2017. I tracked and commented on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas.
It was a time when discussions on the web weren't yet entirely dominated by social media, and it was an exciting moment to be blogging—putting together unlikely bedfellows next to one another, magazine-style, to see what sense could be made by thinking aloud, together. I was writing about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more. The ideas were associatively connected, restless with questions. And all of it, in retrospect, was a platform, a runway for me to write myself into a mode of working as a design researcher and artist.
You can see some of my current and ongoing projects—making, writing, speaking, and even, yes, still blogging—here.
I tweet. You can use this site by going straight to the archives for past posts, or you can use the guide here on the home page.
Some of us here keep watching this and marveling at the emotional quality of that kicking sequence – it seems so violent and strained, the sound of the thing seems pained, the motions frantic. Didn’t these guys see the Terminator movies? We better be nice or we’ll pay in the future!
When I saw this object, I felt myself questioning whether it was animate or inanimate- inanimate that is controlled by another animate being. Humans will impart on things emotions by instinct it seems and it is this aspect in the encounter that intrigues me. Very different from seeing someone in a wheelchair because we see the live human being in it first. How will be come to appreciate, reject, or accommodate robotics as extension of animates and how will be come to inhabit with them? Violent kicking- would be a form of interaction that could occur when we engage with something else that we feel is alive. So eery yet interesting….