An augmented sense allowing you to feel interconnection, as a new tactility. Baotaz is an exploration of the implications of hyper-connection: a research in Near Future Design implementing a prototype augmented sense. It was produced with Nefula and ISIA Florence for La Cura, during La Cura Summer School, and exhibited at La Triennale in Milan and at the European Researchers’ Night.
Baotaz is an augmented sense.
It is an art/science/technology hypothesis to explore the ways in which it is possible to create augmented sensorialities for the human body using technology and data.
In its first version, Baotaz uses the millions of messages published on social networks every day to create a sensibility on the human body to human emotions about “inhabiting the planet”. Each day millions of people express their fears, joys, anxieties and, in general, their emotions about their life on the planet: whether it is for the environment, global warming, new forms of energy, traffic, lifestyle.
Many of them express themselves using social networks. When they do, we capture all of these messages, process them and use the emotional data which we are able to infer from them to drive the augmented sense: emotional data is transformed into light, sounds and vibrations, creating a novel tactility which makes you sensible to enormous amounts of data.
Baotaz uses Human Ecosystems to capture all of this data, perform natural language analysis in 29 languages on it, and provide the results.
Creating such types of body augmentations opens up a wide variety of crucial, critical issues at many levels: philosophical, ethical, legal, psychological, cultural, anthropological, and more. Baotaz confronts with all of these issues by bringing them out into society, and activating open discussions across disciplines, approaches and points of view.
Baotaz was born during La Cura Summer School, through the collaboration of 46 artists, designers, researchers, scientists, hackers, activists, lawyers, philosophers, sociologists and more. It is the result of the collaboration of Art is Open Source, La Cura, Nefula, ISIA Design Firenze, parcodiyellowstone, and VideOfficine.
It was presented for the first time at La Triennale di Milano.
In its next steps, Baotaz will form the basis of the collaboration between La Cura and Fondazione Neuromed, in which we will explore the connections between Arts, Design, Sciences, Technologies and Society.