Golan Levin: And we’re back. Welcome back, every­one, to our sec­ond talk of the morn­ing of Art && Code: Homemade. And it’s my ter­rif­ic plea­sure to intro­duce Lee Wilkins, who is an artist, cyborg, and researcher, and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er inter­est­ed in tech­no­log­i­cal curiosi­ties and the cre­ation of whim­si­cal robots. Lee is a doc­tor­al stu­dent at the University of Toronto, and teach­es wear­able tech­nol­o­gy, phys­i­cal com­put­ing, and new media arts and design at OCAD University and Ryerson University. They’re also co-executive direc­tor at Little Dada, a group of cre­ative tech­nol­o­gists for social change, and com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er for hack​a​day​.io. Folks, Lee Wilkins.

Lee Wilkins: Thank you so much, Golan. I am so excit­ed to be here. And this is a par­tic­u­lar­ly real­ly inter­est­ing for­mat as well because I feel like all of these talks feel real­ly inti­mate because I’m just sit­ting in my home as opposed to sit­ting in this con­fer­ence envi­ron­ment. So I feel like lis­ten­ing to every­thing before me I’ve tak­en a lot of it very much to heart more than I would’ve oth­er­wise. So, thank you so much for putting all this togeth­er, Bill and Golan and the whole team.

So, just quick­ly about myself. I feel like I gen­er­al­ly wear a lot of hats. I’m not real­ly sure exact­ly who I am or what I do but I think I’m all of these dif­fer­ent things. I tend to sort of bounce, real­ly, back and forth between these dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties. You know, at some point I real­ly heav­i­ly iden­ti­fied as an e‑textile prac­ti­tion­er, but I think you’ll see in my work it’s strayed quite a bit from that. 

I do a lot of com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tion. I real­ly love get­ting peo­ple excit­ed about mak­ing weird tech­nol­o­gy. I also have a day job in exper­i­men­tal hosiery man­u­fac­tur­ing, which is large­ly unre­lat­ed to any­thing I’m gonna talk about here but, we all have day jobs. 

The stuff that I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in, you know, is stuff like this. This is a project that I was work­ing on through­out quar­an­tine. So it sort of explores the envi­ron­ment around us. And it’s also some­thing I’m real­ly think­ing about a lot as we go into this next semes­ter of teach­ing and teach­ing online. Thinking about how peo­ple can explore the spaces around them and make tech­nol­o­gy out of some­thing that we nor­mal­ly would­n’t have thought of as tech­nol­o­gy. I feel like it’s an idea I’ve kind of been ped­dling for a long time, but one of for me the inter­est­ing things about being con­fined to my own space is I’m forced to recon­sid­er it again and again in all of these dif­fer­ent kinds of ways. 

But real­ly what my work is con­cerned about is the body and tech­nol­o­gy. And through watch­ing a lot of the folks present this week­end I feel like I’m def­i­nite­ly on the same brain­wave as a lot of folks here. You know, they’re often thought of as very dif­fer­ent things. Technology is thought of in these sort of rigid forms and devices, and the body is like this organ­ic oth­er type deal. So, I’m real­ly about explor­ing the ten­sion between those things. 

This is a project I worked on for the last cou­ple of years called Voids. And it’s actu­al­ly just a very sim­ple sort of light trick. A lot of my projects you’ll see use real­ly sim­ple tech­nol­o­gy to try to max­i­mize those kinds of results. And this project is kind of… I mean, to be real­ly hon­est I real­ly like the idea of putting your head in stuff. I think that’s a real­ly fun thing to do. A lot of my work in the past few years has real­ly been revolv­ing around your head and your face and all of the things that you can do with it. 

So basi­cal­ly what hap­pens here is when one set of lights is on, the per­son whose head is inside one of the trape­zoids can see the oth­er per­son, but the oth­er per­son can only see a reflec­tion of them­selves. And then it sort of switch­es back and forth. So while you’re watch­ing some­one else, they don’t know they’re being watched and they’re watch­ing them­selves. And yeah, it’s just a real­ly sim­ple kind of light trick. It uses the same reflec­tive coat­ings that are on build­ings on win­dows. So there’s no real mag­ic here, but I was super fas­ci­nat­ed by the mate­r­i­al and also the fact that it’s kind of this every­day mate­r­i­al that we real­ly don’t kind of think about. We sort of just take these build­ings almost for grant­ed. And I real­ly like the way it kind of changes your per­cep­tion of space and sort of throws it back and forth. So it’s almost like a con­ver­sa­tion between these two dif­fer­ent peo­ple in terms of per­spec­tive and it sort of being con­stant­ly thrown back and forth. 

So this type of work has sort of led me to this big ques­tion about what is a body, and where do the bound­aries of your body end. And this is where I’m doing my PhD research and I could spend a long time talk­ing to you guys about mate­ri­al­ist the­o­ry. But I’m not gonna do that here, I just want to show you guys some cool art. 

But, basi­cal­ly one thing I’ve been think­ing about a lot is just like, what do we con­sid­er to be our body, and what have we kind of agreed upon? Are we think­ing about the microbes that are all over us? Are we think­ing about what hap­pens if we get cut and bleed. Like, where things start to and stop becom­ing your body? 

And one area I found that was real­ly inter­est­ing or a way of think­ing about this is by using space set­tle­ments. So space set­tle­ments in the last few years have become sort of a cen­tral touch­point to my research. And every time I do a research project, I imag­ine it in my imag­i­nary space sta­tion L4. So, dur­ing the 70s—some of you might be already aware of this—there was a real­ly big move­ment of sort of utopias and imag­in­ing all these dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments that we could live in. And the L5 Society was a group of folks who were super enthu­si­as­tic about the idea of a space set­tle­ment in a point called Lagrange 5. 

So what we can see here is sort of a map of the Earth and the sun. And these labeled points are called Lagrange points. And they are basi­cal­ly points of grav­i­ta­tion­al equi­lib­ri­um. So if you put an object in between…for exam­ple we have L1, which is right between the sun and the Earth, that object will stay in grav­i­ta­tion­al equi­lib­ri­um. And it’s the same for all of those points. They each have sort of slight­ly dif­fer­ent effects. But the L5 Society was imag­in­ing this space sta­tion at Lagrange 5. 

And there’s a whole bunch of real­ly inter­est­ing art sort of about what these space sta­tions would look like and what kind of form they would take. So this is Don Davis, and it’s a piece that illus­trates the Stanford Torus space sta­tion, or space set­tle­ment. And what I like to think of this is like sta­tus quo space. A lot of these space set­tle­ments sort of extrap­o­late on the way we have tech­nol­o­gy already and sort of put it into space. And you know, these very, like, nor­ma­tive ideas that we can pret­ty clear­ly digest. Like okay, so it’s kin­da like Earth but it’s space.

So, I think this idea is super super inter­est­ing. But the way I think of technology…you know, the way I’m try­ing to get peo­ple to think of that stuff dif­fer­ent­ly, is that things aren’t always the way they are because that’s the best way. But they’re sort of embed­ded in these ideas of pow­er and process. And that’s why I like to think of e‑textiles, and soft elec­tron­ics, and weird elec­tron­ics as like a way of resis­tance. I mean resis­tance in par­tial­ly a polit­i­cal sense but also in resis­tance because often these materials…are quite resistive. 

So what I start­ed doing I was work­ing with some friends to imag­ine L4. So L4 is kind of like the equal and oppo­site point of L5. So, math­e­mat­i­cal­ly they’re the same. You could also put a space set­tle­ment in L4. But in our L4 soci­ety, we are…you know, this like, spec­u­la­tive fem­i­nist space sta­tion. And we curated—myself and Hillary Predko, and also Sagan Yee—we curat­ed work from a bunch of dif­fer­ent folks to imag­ine what life would be like on L4. So this is a zine that you can read online and have a look at what these dif­fer­ent folks con­tributed. But also it’s just sort of like— I try to present all of my cur­rent work as though they’re oper­at­ing in this sta­tion that is sort of oppo­site this nor­ma­tive idea of space sta­tions. So, it’s like at an equal and oppo­site kind of float­ing point. And what would those tech­nolo­gies look like, and what would those tech­nolo­gies kind of feel like. 

I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in the idea of space sta­tions because it inher­ent­ly means blur­ring the bound­aries between us and our tech­nol­o­gy. We’re breath­ing in the syn­the­sized air, we are exist­ing in this envi­ron­ment where every­thing has to be kind of curat­ed. So it’s real­ly like, so vis­cer­al­ly about bod­ies? that yeah, I’m total­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by these ideas. 

So, in order to start bring­ing these two things clos­er I’ve sort of divid­ed up some work I’ve been doing into three sort of touch­stones. The first one I’m gonna talk about is bring­ing the human to tech­nol­o­gy. So, tak­ing what we clas­si­fy as like human feel­ings or human ideas and putting them onto this like cold idea of tech­nol­o­gy. So, this is some­thing that I think has been you know…it exists in a com­mer­cial sense. Of course none of the things I’m going to show you have quite the mar­ket val­ue that we might want but yeah. 

The first one I’m gonna show you is this idea of what it would look like if a serv­er room got mar­ried. So think­ing of these two very dis­joint­ed kind of ideas and sort of smash­ing them togeth­er. So this is a piece that I worked on with my col­lab­o­ra­tor Hillary Predko, and it’s a drone dress. It sort of takes these ideas of like drones, and servers, and hard tech­nol­o­gy and sort of pairs it with high fash­ion. So, this was a part of Make Fashion 2018. It’s a run­away piece, so exist­ing in a very high-fashion envi­ron­ment. But basi­cal­ly there’s this drone that sort of fol­lows the mod­el down the run­way. And her gar­ment is made out of Ethernet cables and there’s indus­tri­al fans on her hips. And you know, it cre­ates this actu­al­ly quite ele­gant out­put. And we sort of select­ed the most bro-iest of tech­nolo­gies like drones and Ethernet cables and sort of smashed them togeth­er in a sort of high-fashion wed­ding dress. So yeah, that’s sort of part of this explo­ration that I’m going for. 

This is anoth­er project that I worked on actu­al­ly just as the last thing I did before the pan­dem­ic hit. This is called Machine Yearning. So it’s a pret­ty basic machine learn­ing project. And it’s just sort of about ways we can see the machine kind of reach­ing back to us. 

So basi­cal­ly it is a whole bunch of per­son­al ads. And we took them from local Toronto ads, because we made this in Toronto. And we sort of put them through a machine learn­ing algo­rithm and tried to have it spit out what the machine real­ly wants and tried to pull that sense of desire. I’ve high­light­ed some of my favorites here. I real­ly real­ly like them because it kind of takes all of these dif­fer­ent types of yearn­ing and puts them togeth­er like the machine is real­ly fight­ing to try to find what it wants, or try­ing to find that sim­i­lar­i­ty. But yeah, it prints them out on lit­tle print­er receipts, which again feels like this very for­mal way of pre­sent­ing this idea of yearning. 

So yeah, that’s sort of like the ways I’ve been try­ing to make the tech­nol­o­gy more human. But then bring­ing the tech­nol­o­gy over to the human side I think is anoth­er inter­est­ing thing that I’ve been kind of explor­ing. Like I was real­ly think­ing about what han­nah perner-wilson said yes­ter­day about the idea of falling in and out of love with e‑textiles. Definitely can iden­ti­fy with that. I feel like… Yeah, things have changed. So when I was think­ing about my e‑textile prac­tice, I was think­ing well what is it about the prac­tice that I real­ly find inter­est­ing. And I think what I real­ly find inter­est­ing is the idea of find­ing affor­dances using the body and also like being phys­i­cal­ly very flex­i­ble and pli­able and try­ing to make tech­nol­o­gy into these organ­ic kind of forms. 

So this is a cou­ple of exper­i­ments I was work­ing on sort of using my face as the plat­form of the inter­face. So, they’re all super basic. They’re all just switch­es that’re made with con­duc­tive tape. And they sort of use the ele­ments that already exist, of course on my face or things that I’m already doing, to cre­ate these small ele­ments of inter­ac­tion. So, with this I’m sort of try­ing to imag­ine what it would look like as a full-body inter­face that you don’t real­ly have to think about your inter­ac­tion with tech­nol­o­gy, you don’t real­ly have to think about engag­ing with it. It sort of comes about as a result of your exis­tence with­in the world, right. So what does this look like when the tech­nol­o­gy starts to become part of us? We don’t have to think about like press­ing this but­ton. We can just sort of inter­act with our bod­ies in this way. 

So of course all of these are just you know, some tape, some alli­ga­tor clips, and some LEDs. But what I real­ly want to do with this is prompt ways we can think about engag­ing with the body and using it to con­trol oth­er things or engage with things in anoth­er way.

And then the third kind of deal is cre­at­ing this like, blur­ring the bound­ary a lit­tle bit more delib­er­ate­ly. So once we’re at that point, how can we start to almost for­get when…you know, for­get that one is the oth­er. And I’ve tak­en a cou­ple of stabs at this over a lot of dif­fer­ent types of projects. And I don’t think I’ve quite seam­less­ly merged the human and the machine yet but…you know, work­ing towards it. 

So this is a piece called Android Apparatus, and it’s sort of about the sym­bio­sis of a per­former and appa­ra­tus. So how these two objects you can be ful­ly inter­twined togeth­er and cre­ate a rec­i­p­ro­cal interaction. 

So, this is a cir­cus per­former piece, and basi­cal­ly the wear­er is on a lyra, so it’s a sus­pend­ed hoop, and she does a per­for­mance. The piece is designed— We put a bunch of sen­sors all over the artist and we had her do this spe­cif­ic danc­ing. And we used that data that we got to cre­ate this gar­ment. So we looked at what areas of her body in this dance she uses to touch the hoop. We looked at how he’s phys­i­cal­ly mov­ing, how many times she spun around. And we used that to phys­i­cal­ly design the gar­ment. So the pat­terns on it are the data from the dance, and the loca­tion of every­thing is based on exact­ly how she’s mov­ing. And as she moves it changes the lights on the gar­ment. So we’re try­ing to sort of cre­ate this thing where in order for the gar­ment to exist in its full beau­ty, it requires to be used in this very spe­cif­ic way. And in order for the per­for­mance to exist in its full beau­ty it requires the use of the gar­ment. So it’s cre­at­ing this almost symbiosis. 

This is anoth­er piece that I worked on at Dinacon last year. And it is about col­lab­o­ra­tive sens­ing. So, it’s a sen­sor that can hear bat nois­es. So, nor­mal­ly we can’t real­ly hear them with our human years. We aren’t capa­ble of receiv­ing that high fre­quen­cy. So basi­cal­ly one per­son has a sen­sor on their hand, and they are able to point it in var­i­ous direc­tions and try to find these nois­es of the bat. And the oth­er per­son has a trans­duc­er on their head. So, a trans­duc­er’s a bone-conducting sen­sor so only they can hear the out­put. But these two people…you know, indi­vid­u­al­ly they can’t hear the bat, but when they touch hands they com­plete their cir­cuit. So they have to sort of walk togeth­er through the jun­gle and find these bats and lis­ten togeth­er and it cre­ates like a col­lab­o­ra­tive kind of experience. 

So in this sort of way we’re sort of blur­ring what it is to have this sin­gu­lar expe­ri­ence and it becomes this group expe­ri­ence of walk­ing togeth­er and being togeth­er. And… Yeah, so that’s what I’m kind of try­ing to do here, is fig­ure out how we can—if we can expand the sense of one sort of engagement. 

So I thought I’d take a cou­ple min­utes to talk about my next steps. I have been real­ly think­ing about what else I could do to cre­ate this blur­ring of envi­ron­ments and blur­ring of inter­ac­tions. And again, dur­ing quar­an­tine I’ve become very very inter­est­ed in this idea of fish­tanks, most­ly for a hob­by. You can see my fish­tank over here. And I’ve been real­ly think­ing about what that’s almost like for the fish. They’re almost like cre­at­ing a space sta­tion for the fish to exist. I’m real­ly into the idea of like fil­ter­less tanks that are real­ly self-sustaining. So I was sort of think­ing about how I could have the fish expe­ri­ence this idea of L4, or this idea of the space station. 

So what I’m gonna do next is I’m in the process of build­ing a shrimp space sta­tion. It’s going to be a wear­able gar­ment that allows the shrimp to expe­ri­ence the out­side and are almost going to be… It’s going to be like a wear­able device, that I’ll have to take shrimp out so they can get their UV light and be hap­py in their envi­ron­ment. But also it pro­vides this fully-sustaining sys­tem for them to live. So yeah, that’s what I’m real­ly excit­ed about next. I’m real­ly excit­ed to try to make some wear­able shrimp space stations. 

So that’s about it. That’s kind of all I have to talk about. I’m hap­py to take ques­tions. If you want to get a hold of me you can find me at @Leeborg_. And yeah, thank you so much.

Golan Levin: Lee, thank you so much for this incred­i­ble pre­sen­ta­tion. Lots of great com­ments in the chat. I per­son­al­ly love the idea of mount­ing things on one’s head as a mode of artis­tic practice. 

Got a bunch of quick ques­tions for you. What’s a new sense you’ve been han­ker­ing for personally?

Lee Wilkins: A new sense. Hm. I’m not real­ly too sure. I have a cou­ple of implants. So I have like a mag­net­ic implant. However I feel like it’s not maybe nec­es­sar­i­ly every­thing it’s kin­da cracked up to be. So I’ve been real­ly inter­est­ed in kind of explor­ing oth­er implantable sens­es or ways to aug­ment that and make it—yeah, like a lit­tle bit more of a way of per­ceiv­ing the world as opposed to just a cool par­ty trick where I can pick up small Canadian change. 

Levin: Mm. So this ques­tion is more sort of—goes to the phi­los­o­phy of what you’re doing. I real­ly appre­ci­ate how your work spans both sort of per­for­ma­tive aug­men­ta­tions of the body that are almost like fash­ion or you know, for oth­er peo­ple to kind of dis­play. That there’s a kind of a pub­lic face to it. As well as very pri­vate things like you know, putting a mag­net in your body and things that aren’t obvi­ous to oth­ers and which enhance your own sen­so­ri­um. Do you feel like— This is the ques­tion. Do you feel like you’re pro­to­typ­ing for a future you want to see, or do you feel like these works are set in the present and are ask­ing peo­ple to reflect on their cur­rent rela­tion­ships with technology?

Wilkins: Yeah, that’s a great ques­tion. Definitely when I sit­u­ate my work with­in L4, it’s very future-focused. But I also don’t think you can like, snap your fin­gers and make a dif­fer­ent future, right. We have to crit­i­cal­ly think about why we think about tech­nol­o­gy the way we do, and we have to crit­i­cal­ly think about why you think one thing is tech­nol­o­gy and anoth­er thing is not. Especially like the ear­li­er slides I was show­ing all the food switch­es and stuff I made, you know. Like, I’m not nec­es­sar­i­ly say­ing that we should always use corn as an inter­face for things, but I am say­ing we should think about why we don’t. So…I’m not sure if that answers that but maybe.

Levin: Yeah. Sure we’re say­ing both, and it makes sense that we have to kind of pro­to­type it to get there.

This is a ques­tion from Lea, which is ​“How do we think about wear­able per­for­mance gar­ments that move away from reac­tive or visu­al­iza­tion roles and into inter­ac­tiv­i­ty or with its own agency? In oth­er words, how do we meld per­for­mance to unpre­dictabil­i­ty?” Thinking about per­for­mance garments.

Wilkins: Yeah. Totally. I really—you know, I’ve been think­ing so much about agency in like the philo­soph­ic sense. So how we can allow objects to inter­act on their own with­out any of this like human-type inter­fer­ence. And I’ve been think­ing a lot about ther­more­ac­tive gar­ments and those types of atmospheric-reactive gar­ments to try to cre­ate that sense of agency that these things on us are enact­ing around us and not because of us. And I think that’s a real­ly inter­est­ing idea that has def­i­nite­ly been swirling around in my head.

Levin: And a final ques­tion, because we have a moment, which is, you also make zines. And I’m curi­ous if you could talk about how or whether or to what extent that plays into your cre­ative prac­tice. Is it a mode of pub­li­ca­tion or do you actu­al­ly see a much more tight mate­r­i­al con­nec­tion in terms of giv­ing things to people?

Wilkins: Yeah, absolute­ly. I mean, I start­ed mak­ing— I have a cou­ple of zines—I could drop it in the chat—about about wires, LEDs, and but­tons. And these are three things that I feel like are often real­ly over­looked in the elec­tron­ics world of like ​“Oh, just con­nect it with a wire” and there’s so much small knowl­edge there and very tiny facts that it’s real­ly hard to get a han­dle on. So I real­ly want­ed a way for peo­ple to be able to get that infor­ma­tion with­out feel­ing over­whelmed or like it’s super technical. 

So I feel like zines are super…they’re an approach­able way. You kin­da like, pick one up when you’re wait­ing for an appoint­ment or wait­ing at a mak­er space or what­ev­er. So it gives peo­ple this kind of casu­al way to absorb that detailed infor­ma­tion. Like I just keep think­ing back to when I was learn­ing elec­tron­ics and I first stripped a wire that was mul­ti­strand. And I was so con­fused because I thought that all wires were sol­id core and nobody had ever told me. And it’s just lit­tle moments like that that I want peo­ple to have an acces­si­ble way to under­stand. So, that’s sort of my moti­va­tion behind the zines.

Levin: Got a ques­tion from Kate Hartman. And we have basi­cal­ly one minute left, we’ll see if we can throw this one at you. ​“How do your art prac­tice, com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing, teach­ing, and doc­tor­al research inter­act and inter­sect with each oth­er? Or do you see them separately?”

Wilkins: Yeah, I feel like it’s always…they’re always swirling togeth­er and always influ­enc­ing each oth­er. So for exam­ple like some­how L4 has now made it into my dis­ser­ta­tion, but also I’ve run com­mu­ni­ty events with it, so it’s impos­si­ble to keep them one out of the oth­er. I feel like they are…yeah, they’re always, always self-influencing. And some­times that could be help­ful but some­times…[laughs]…some­times it builds on itself a lot.