Nancy Nowacek

MUSCLE is a class exploring the body as technology through readings, sketches, performance, dirty prototypes and conceptual proposals.

For the past 79,850 years of evolution, the body has been the primary tool for transforming the world. Over the past 150 years, the body’s capacities and capabilities have been increasingly outsourced to machinery, appliances, and devices, and essentialized to eyes, ears, and fingertips.

We will study the gap between what the body wants and what technology currently asks of it with the goal of bringing the body back into modern life. Students interested in digital performance, physical computing, computer vision and motion tracking will leave the class with a broad foundation in movement and conceptual methods and development for future projects and applications.

The course will survey a range of movement languages and practices — from sign language to crossfit, martial arts, and contemporary cultural forms like dance and slang —and examine the history of movement in industrial design and the physical choreography of tools, and the history of gesture in hardware and software. We will engage with ideas of interface, affordance, prosthetic, and avatar to marry movement, meaning, and device in new and experimental ways.

The course is conceptually focused, but we will perform research-in-practice through small, weekly experiments that take the form of sketches, diagrams, videos, and prototypes. Classes may involve moving.