merlerker-AugmentedBody

My project is quite simple and silly: a “nose isolator” that finds your nose and masks everything else. Bodies are strange, and I appreciate projects that acknowledge that universally-felt, awkward but intimate relationship we have with our bodies, like Dominic Wilcox’s “Tummy Rumbling Amplification Device” [link] and Daniel Eatock’s “Draw Your Nose” [link]. Isolating the nose has the effect of forcing you to confront a body part that you’ve probably felt self-conscious about at some point in your life, and allowing it to become an endearing little creature in itself. Though it’s a simple project and treatment, I feel it’s successful in creating a delightful and different relationship with your body. I’m proud of the conceptual bang-for-buck: it’s an important exercise for me to let go of perfection and overambitious projects that never end.

Originally I was trying to apply the nose isolator to scenes from films, but got frustrated trying to get handsfree.js to run on a <video> source and doing the correct mirroring and translating to get it all to line up. I instead created a performance using my own nose that leans into the nose-as-creature.