Skip to content

Expressive Technology

David Nunez
David Nunez
1 min read

From an email I just sent out:

I’m building a robotic marionette (see http://www.delamaquina.com). The couple times I’ve shown it off in public, it is fascinating to watch reactions — first, people notice this creepy puppet moving around… then inevitably, their eyes travel up the strings and see this machine with spinning pulleys and wires. They stare at this device, mesmerized by the motion and peering all around it to see how it fits together. THEN, after a few minutes, they notice I’m standing off to the side, pushing buttons and working sensors to make the puppet move… that’s when the conversation begins, “OH! you’re controlling it by that computer! How does it work?” or “What does this mean for puppetry?” or “Who’s controlling whom?

So maybe “Technology is just another art medium through which emotion can be expressed?”

Indeed, I think that’s becoming my own unresolved question: can we coax expressiveness out of technology, itself?

David Nunez Twitter

Dir of Technology at the MIT Museum • Writing about emerging tech's impact on your life • Speculative insights on the intersection of humanity and technology 🤖

Comments


Related Posts

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums

Yesterday, the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order and dismantle the order’s strong net neutrality rules (New York Times summary of what happened). You have probably read about how this might impact broadband quality for things like streaming television or even basic websites via tiered access

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums

Requiem for Rhinos - behind the scenes video

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts

On this site, I have the Broken Links Checker Plugin chugging away in the background. He tirelessly checks and rechecks every link in every post to find URLs that no longer work; pages sometimes just disappear. In most cases, I’m able to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts