2010CIMUAT Espana Ddoming Hamdan August Ingles FINAL LART

DOMINGUES, Diana; HAMDAN, Camila; AUGUSTO, Leci. Biocybrid Body and Rituals in Urban Mixed Life.
In: Congreso
Internacional Mujer, Arte y Tecnologia en la Nueva Esfera Pblica-CIMUAT, Valencia, 3-4 noviembre, 2010.
Authors: Diana Domingues, Camila Hamdan, Leci Augusto

Institution: University of Braslia, LART Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, UnB-Gama, Brazil.
Address: LART - Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, Faculdade UnB-Gama, rea Especial 1, Setor Central,
Caixa Postal 8114, Gama-DF, CEP: 72.405-610, Brazil
E-mail: dgdomingues@gmail.com; camilahamdan@gmail.com; leciaugusto@gmail.com.
Keywords: women, technology, bioscybrid, cyberactivism, mixed reality
Title: Biocybrid body and rituals in urban mixed life1

Enactive bodily condition was expanded by Software Art and its sophisticated
interface design, bringing a proposal for a novel kind of art related to aesthetic,
anthropological, philosophical changes and challenges in life and social relationships.
Locative interface activates an interstitial zone between physical space and data space, and
configures a biocybrid existence. A cybrid bios2 expands human actions in zones that blend
biological signals, cyberdata and also the hybrid proprieties of the physical space
(Domingues, 2008a). Mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing, together with pervasive
and sentient interfaces are responsible for the biocybrid revolution and its unprecedented
changes and challenges in the history of human cyberculture. In terms of humanization of
technology (Domingues, 2009, 2003a, 1997), we should reflect on the qualities of different
technological environments and the resulting social implications that trace diffuse boundaries
between real and virtual worlds, whose roots are remotely based on the notion of feedback in
cybernetics (Wiener, 1954), now expanded by the science of interface, biophysics and
bioinformatics. LART3 researches focus on recent forms of art involving the extension of
technological and cultural forms which arise from mobile connections and urban mixed life
(Domingues, Reategui et al., 2008b), where interface design asks for modes that can provide
social experiences and on-line relationships co-located in cyber and physical space, and that
extend the contemporary fringes of cyberculture.
We propose that the connected body
emphasizes rituals in biocybrid zones. The body signals by manipulating data, and its
unfolding by flows of feedback cause the body be affected and affect the environment. That
continuum generates a biocybrid zone between body and flesh - cyberspace and data - mixed
to the hybrid properties of physical space.
Our biocybrid interactive systems allow connected people to experiment a
reengineering of life when acting by synthetic senses, living here and there in physical space
DOMINGUES, Diana; HAMDAN, Camila; AUGUSTO, Leci. Biocybrid Body and Rituals in Urban Mixed Life. In: Congreso
and cyberspace generating a different scenario for the theater of life through biocybrid
narratives. The world where we live is no longer the same we lived in before the explosion of
interfaces in our lives. Mobile interfaces and ubiquitous computing disseminate cyberspace,
and reality is expanded, reality is augmented, reality is mixed, because the virtual of
cyberspace is increasingly present everywhere. The sense of presence is mediated by
interfaces in our daily life. The concept of second-order cybernetics related to Science of
Complexity and its emergent properties is fundamental for our speculative software written to
respond to the complex relationship art and life. A world without boundaries, in its whole
state, and the enactive mobile condition, being connected everywhere, all reaffirm the relevant
ideas of the Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, from the 1980s,
regarding the observer included in the environment, and their autopoietic mutual feedback.
Biofeedback, networked connections and wireless connections qualify sorts of computermediated life that require an adequate design from the technological apparatus resulting from
the human involvement in the communication with a system, provide social features engaged
in a communication practice, exchanging the cognitive process with data in cyberspace, and
expand the metaphors of artistic discourses. Art, emotion, and control and interaction
mechanisms, included in the rules of a computer program, by software and the diversity of
hardware interface, in every device that we use in our daily actions, even when we are in
public and urban spaces, insert the cyberspace in our existence, by adding traces of virtual in
real life and melting them, involving them in an engineered reality". Those conditions create
opportunities for artists and scientists to reinvent the nature of life.
Critical issues in the field of mobile technologies connectiveness, in the sense of
Howard Rheingold (2002), discuss the understanding of the procedural specificity of
computer programs, of mobile devices, and their social implications. In mobile artworks, the
essence of the code and the performative use of technologies are adapted and transformed into
interventions in cultural activities. Such practices confirm the relevant postulation of Walter
Benjamins historical text from 1934, the author as producer, and the role of the artist as an
engineer by adapting the technological apparatus for social interventions. We emphasize the
reengineering of reality, understanding the transit of real and virtual worlds in daily life,
under the role of artist/engineer, and womens contribution in the post-human historical idea
of connected bodies.
Artists/engineers - collaborative practices and technological inventions

The role of the artist/engineer and the presence of women have been relevant since the
advent of computer machines. Familiarity and empathy with computer machines undoubtedly
surprised engineers community. Historical texts inform that women programmed the
computer with the "required familiarity with the machine's electrical logic, its physical
structure, and its mechanical operation. The women learned by crawling around the ENIAC's
massive frame, locating burned-out vacuum tubes, shorted connections, and other nonclerical
bugs (BRYSON, 1998).
It is not our goal to trace a panorama of womens presence in Art and TechnoScience.
However, we will highlight the effective participation of Allucqure Rosanne Stone (Sandy
Stone), who started her career at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, came under pressure to
pursue a graduate degree in engineering, worked with many of the pioneers in a wide variety
of scientific and technological fields, received a B.A. in film. A coder since the beginning of
art
and technologies manifestations, Stone built a small computer, and taught herself
programming. We chose Stone because of her interdisciplinary way of working: she wrote
medical software, later became an engineering manager, a manufacturer of musical
synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machine, among other contributions and innovations for
art and science close to fundamental social
implications, culminating in her theory
concerning the History of Consciousness program, and the sense of presence, which we
regard as the main topic in the discussion about human life and technological inventions. In
1984 she met Donna Haraway when she was in the process of writing A Manifesto for
Cyborgs, and the foundation of the academic field of cyborg studies. Stones studies
culminate in her dissertation, Presence, supervised by Haraway, and consisting of an annoted
compendium of elements in anthropology, sociology, computer science, journalism, and
fiction.
The mentioned approach related to art and technoscience is seminal for our
collaborative practices in LART and researches in Software Art (Huhtamo, 2003) - for
developing code and specific rules to propitiate several forms of communication close to
the expansion of life in the post-human culture. Those practices refer to a more general
systemic technological approach that may not be applied to other forms of media art and its
multimedia artifacts. Our central focus in biocybrid systems go critically beyond the
conventional and implicitly dualist concept of human-computer interaction and propose a

more holistic participation in the sense of a bodily continuous zone. In this case, technological
investigation requires the development of ubiquitous computing, mobile interfaces,
biofeedback and multisensorial interfaces, cross modal interfaces, data mining and data
visualization and other topics which require software development for the human-computer
interface (HCI), and the use of people in physical spaces. Intertwined relationships among
body/environment/nets ask for software capacities and different hardware, reaffirming the
ubiquitous and mobile condition and the sense of presence in physical and cyberspace.
In the beginning of the 1990s Mark Weiser (1995) announced the invisible computer;
the transparent interfaces; the era of calm technologies. The computer will be invisible and
melt in the periphery, said the pioneer of ubiquitous computing. He affirmed: Pagers, cell
phones, news-services, the World-Wide-Web, email, TV, and radio bombard us frenetically.
But when some technologies lead to true calm and comfort, they become calm. Our thesis is
that mobile and ubiquitous interfaces are part of life, they are enactive and locative, and that
we are co-located in physical and cyberspace. Our body acts and creates through biocybrid
zones in urban life. In the last ten years, projects have explored the use of technologies in
daily life, and the mobile collective computer, by using specific wireless equipment (laptops,
palms, cell phones, bluetooth, Wi-Fi, chips, RDIF tags - Radio Frequency Identification, and
other mobile interfaces), and the use of ubiquitous, pervasive and sentient computing
technologies generate a co-located experience.
Daily rituals and mixed reality: the biocybrid body and the logic of rituals
Our researches in art and technoscience take body actions as the replication of rituals
in urban mixed life with the mobile technology, and consider the body in action as part of the
ecosystem. Bodily actions by interfaces dialogue with the outside, and revert the modern
conception of the body separate from the cosmos. Science of interface and the cybernetic
principle of feedback eliminate the concept of the sphere and what is inside and outside.
Interfaces connect in and out spaces, and mobile connections transform urban space in
ritualistic space for embodied action to interfaces, augmented reality, enactive interfaces, cell
phones, bluetooth,
GPS, biosensors, computer vision, and other devices are always
connecting our bodies to other devices, satellites, modems. We are in states of feedback with
the environment and the physical space. Similarly to the desire of ancient and native rituals
when people performed rituals by dancing, smoking, singing, walking, we connect and send
energies to the ecosystem (Domingues, 1997) Native cultures and Afro-Brazilian religions are
quite phenomenological in their beliefs and desires to dialogue with invisible cosmic forces.
The interactive experience can be compared to those shamans or pags incorporations,
embodiments, in Brazilian tribes, who accomplish to communicate with the cosmos because
they believe that shamans have special powers regarding the ecosystem. During rituals
entities such as Ogum, Oxum and Iemanj are incorporated, who are called guides of our
identities. Just the same, human altered identities have now social behavior, cognitive and
emotional situations shared with the responsive environments of augmented reality, social
platforms or other technologies mixed to the environment.
Urban mixed life is the condition of being connected by interfaces everywhere. The
willingness itself of being connected, or taking part in a social platform, or adding information
to place where we are in situ by using mobile technology, as a cell phone, places our body in
an expanded reality that unchain our social perception and launch it in a constructive process,
by receiving and giving mutant identity, and being potentially in the condition of non linear,
unpredictable, self-regeneration states. The mobile interfaced body feels and acts by sharing
qualities that come from the connectivity of synthetic vision of cameras, satellites, biosensors,
bluetooth, tags, codes, wireless devices, GPS, or
transmit
other technological
components that
and exchange data, and co-locate us in virtual and physical worlds, thus
transforming us into biocybrid humans.

The mobile condition, when compared to a ritual, implies logic of participation, tribal
logic, collaborative actions, spirit of communion, of object-taboos, similar to that logic
implicit in the offerenda of religions: offering and receiving, sharing and attempting to get to
invisible forces (Fischer, 2003). We propose that mobile devices give us the same sensorial
and cognitive desire that some old forms of painted bodies, masks, feather artifacts,
maracas, and another artifices to receive and send energies to the external world, and thus we
would reach a reframed consciousness from artificial systems (Domingues, 2001). These
technologies provide us with some desires to be empowered, and artists intensify the
exploration of how technologies are changing our world perception, and create systems to
expand interactions, immersions, proprioceptions, hyperconnections, self-regenerations,
which can be compared to magic or pleasant and powerful emotion, closer to a trance
experience. Our expanded body has other limits.
Tattoos artwork and urban mixed life

The theme of the artworks we have chosen for this essay is the anthropological
presence of tattoos in human culture. Diana Domingues discusses the Living tattoos artwork
and its speculative software, which intends to create a social platform of networked tattoos
communities. It proposes the co-existence in physical space and cyberspace, and environment
evolution is based on tattoos identification patterns and members behavior traces, by
eliminating the diversity of race, geography, gender, and other cultural differences. We
propose strategies to engineering reality by the use of social and free software and a mobile
condition that activates a mutant morphology of tattoos by translating how diversity of
communication and manifested personalities influence the emergent properties and regulate
the potential interface design culminating in artistic and cultural metamorphosis according to
the social rules in Cyberculture. The project Living Tattoos uses embedded technologies in
order to exploit the a variety of possibilities of co-existence in cyberspace and physical
worlds. The work addresses the human condition emerging from the fact that we are living in
an increasingly interfaced, mobilized world where technologies redesign our lives. In its
biocybrid origin, it is a social platform for a techno-collective cyberactivism, taking the net as
a hub for creative workshops, centered in a social collaborative network that enables people to
produce contents by adding information of their lives, personality traits, and graphic images
tattooed on their bodies.
Throughout human history people have added to their bodies iconic shapes: from
flowers, dragons, butterflies, to angels, snakes, and other religious figures, and in the platform
people can customize their own pages with their tattoos and texts, images and videos. The
digital apparatus proposes the adaptation, transformation and liberation of the tattoos
condition for members of a networked community, available in free software and A-life
process, enabling evolutionary identities, enactments of members in the on-line forum, blogs,
mob blogs and photoblogs; the site promotes the aggregation of identities by sending SMS
and MMS, and also draw geolocated existential narratives in digital GPS, tracking, mapping
flows of tattooed people in urban space. Locative interfaces also add to the environment, the
geographic data of tattooed people, using Google Maps. Tattoos are sent via photos and also
messages come on phones or to the site by email. The environment and the mutual sharing of
identities provoke contamination of personal values and formal patterns, creating social
regulations and mutant morphologies. Invitations disseminated in Orkut call people to enter in
our living tattoos cyberterritory. By accepting the rules, they can send their tattoos by cell
phone or email, and the given body will go through a metamorphic and collective process of
mutations.
Metaphorically, flesh bodies participate in a sacrifice of a rite of passage that gives
back mutant and unpredictable properties resulting from dialogues. Every tattoo becomes an
agent representing a member of the collective. He/she experiences life as it could be, because
the digital body is liberated from the constraints of material and biological life. The excess of
boundaries in a poet's work is still very much alive in cyberspace. The body is exposed to
evolutionary vicissitudes and surprises of biocybrid life. Mobile and nomadic connections by
wireless and networked technologies transform the tattoos (digital shapes) in 3D creatures,
managed by genetic algorithms and the unpredictability of living organisms. In the platform,
each person sends us his/her own tattoo by mobile phone or by email. When arriving on the
platform, they are turned into 3D shapes by a graphical tool for extrusion, and its features
undergo a two-dimensional graphical user interface that makes the tattoo a three-dimensional
object, becoming a creature. Being 3D modelled they are placed in a virtual ground, a
tattooarium, to live together with other tattoos, becoming an a-life creature, and mutate by
following simulated genetic laws. The relationships of people connected in the social platform
in cyberspace, and the evolution of their communication is evaluated by using the terms of
their dialogues coming from a search engine data-mining system - which provides us with
specific traits of their personalities, and also the frequency of their communication, that
guarantees their evolution. The terms create a linguistic database and are the source for the
tattoos generative code, capturing the subjectivity of people. Pace, freedom, irritation, hurry,
collaboration or other personality trait will influence each other and the a-life in the tattoo
community. A-life algorithms are responsible for the emergent states of the shapes. A datamining engine collects information of the tattooed-people blog and contaminations on
linguistic and graphic levels resulting from preferences translated into interface design,
according to how communication diversity and manifested personalities influence the
emergent properties of the collaborative web site. A text-mining system extracts graphs,
trasforming data in a dynamic data visualization of social relationships.
Urban interventions in flash mobs reterritorialize physical spaces for digital partners.
Living Tattoos validates co-existence in digital and physical worlds. Reciprocity of people
and groups exchanging tattoos correspond to their desire for mutations, monstrosity,
grotesque, and mutant alterity. Expanded existence in cyberspace confirms the symbolic
power of tattoos: they are alibis for love, religious devotion, divine powers, political
involvement, protection from dangers, plea for fertility: a tattoo is the graffiti for the soul or
tattoos are merely decorative and fancy living accessories of the post-biological era. Life
transit and time passing in the cyberterritory bring a collection of experiences lived in
cyberspace as the source of emergent levels of the fantastic, mysterious, unimaginable,
fictional condition of digital bodies or digital phantoms. Another point is to reaffirm life in the
physical space by inviting people on-line who are connected in cyberspace to be together in
situ, by participating in flash mobs and meeting in public environments. In the Living Tattoos
social platform there is a special section where it is discussed beforehand, on-line, about the
places where people are going to meet. By activating a Tattoo mob (Rheingold, 2002), a
group of tattooed people suddenly meet in a predetermined place and add to the synergy of
mobile communication, portable computing, wireless networks and collective action. When
located in physical space, a GPS tracking mechanism helps users to get together by showing
where they are in their mobile devices, such as smart phones, wireless notebooks, PDAs, etc.
Simulations of tattoo images are projected on a building. In these interventions, tattoos
images sent by community members are displayed on large building walls. The cityscape
becomes an alternative canvas for body tattoos. The system uses interfaces of ubiquitous
computing, locative, pervasive and sentient mobile technologies (mobile interfaces: cell
phones MMS and SMS) to communicate with the Living Tattoos platform. Locative interfaces
are GPS and Google Maps. GPS mapping and tracking system generate an urban flow of
tattoos in city buses. Tattoos Mob is the part of the project which offers a physical
instantiation of social networks, which install urban mixed life in a biocybrid zone. The
remote control Wii activates marks on the screen which displays the city map. Arrows point
to places and members of the tattooed community locations, and people identified on the
screen present themselves, showing their tattooed body, while in Google Maps, the place
where the person lives is displayed together with photographs posted, sounds and other data
sent to the system. An urban, public wall becomes a public interactive terminal. Body textures
are projected on external walls of buildings, and transform the city into the skin of the body.
Images coming from mobile phones or messages exchanged modify what is private and what
is public. The intimate patterns of bodies become public patterns and transform the city scene.
The idea of the urban provides a framework that is independent of the literal materiality of
place of a given city. Interfaces provide different forms to actualize the city in a Urban Mixed
Life. Emergent behaviors of connected people evoke the urban as complex relationships of
people. This project provides an exploratory environment to support social interaction, and
enables users to act as content producers by sharing experiences and information connected
through new wireless devices, transforming the technologies into a dynamic experience that
modifies our way of living. Our Living Tattoos embedded system on computer graphics,
artificial life, data visualization, social platform proposes to be an example of a mobile
network governed by the social fabric of a biocybrid urban mixed life.
Camila Hamdan propose Augmented Reality performances related to tattoos, and
points out issues regarding the theme of tattoos. The study of several civilizations has
demonstrated that tattoos have been used as a means of achieving the most varied contents:
ritualized bodies that transcend force, fertility, pain and desires. As a magical element, a
tattoo allows the ritualization of the body and creates fantastic imagination.
The Opened Body Connection4 performance is Camila Hamdans proposal for a
biocybrid that co-exists among augmented and mixed reality, computer vision and the
materiality of space. During a performance, she added a tattoo on her body, on its vital signs,
by creating a biocybrid system, corresponding to her fantastic imagination design. The
performance results in the act of drawing the tag whose code is a tattoo, and the tattoo artist,
in real time, has inscribed on the back of the artist/performer the computation language of the
code referred to the form of a wing.The code in script on the skin of her body, in real time,
during the performance, added an augmented reality technology to her body. The tattoo
became a mixed reality system, because it was mixed to the life of the environment. Mixed
reality, derived from the augmented reality technology, and the use of tags for computational
code and cameras in computer vision reads that code and the result is the projection of form
of the skin, in this case, the tattoo, is out of Camilas body. Meanwhile, the audience in the
space of Mobilefest was there, and on-line people participated in the ritual. The tattoo was
done in the form of a label or tag with the computer code written on the body, setting on the
skin tissue a three-dimensional animation for Camilas whole life. In a previous version, the
code of the tags was stamped or printed on the body, and the computer code, in augmented
reality, appeared using the computer vision of cameras in the exhibition/performance
<body>5. In the latest version, instead of the stamp, the code was tattooed forever on the
body, and cameras for computer vision read the tag. Immediately the correspondent tattoo, in
this case, a wind (fig. 3), appears in a big display: larger screen, cell phone, monitor. The
tattoo is also a proposal of Living Tattoos6 that was born in the physical space with data
virtualized between body and support, and the emptiness of the room. In the interval of flesh
data - silicon, in a biocybrid ritual the tattoo phantom is held. Another part of the ritual
occurs in the same way as in tribal logic, in the spirit of collective, community, communion:
Camilas body is offered on-line in a
network through streaming as a CyberTV. The
cyberperformance configures the relationship between human, computer, and the

environment, a mixture of information transmitted in real time on-line, via streaming of
sounds, images and texts. And the channel of interaction is a social network.
The back of the performers body is offered as a landscape in mixed reality and
presented to the network thanks to the camera placed in the ceiling, and the computer vision
reading the tag and transforming it into a wing. The tag has the form of the sign of a copyleft,
that is - the letter "C" (inverted) of a marker in a 3D shape. To read the C the camera and
computer vision use the ARToolKit open source library, decoded by computer vision, using
cameras, cameras of cell phones, webcams. Camilas body was shared across social platforms
such as Orkut, Twitter, and Facebook. For two hours, three-dimensional animations traveled
through the body being tattooed, in a ritualistic moment, experienced in the interstitial space
between flesh and cyberdata. On the back, the copyleft figure tattooed as a tag in augmented
reality allowed the insertion and projection out of the body of three-dimensional animated
wings. Accordingly, the marker or tag makes a pun with the concept of copyright, which is
commonly used in reference to the rights granted to the author of an original work. Thus,
copyleft opens to newly thinking copyright as a way of subverting the laws of copyright
protection and remove barriers to use, distribution and modification, in this case, of a creative
work, demanding that the same freedom is preserved in modified versions.
Opened Body Connection is an artistic proposal that refers to the body without
authorship, the right to copy, to collective and artistic production with the use of free software
and open source. "If someone comes into your flight, but rather the sylph or a cloud, a
shadow, is a self, one way airline involved, engaging, happy to be vague, for living on the
edge of the visible and invisible" (BACHELARD, 1990, p. 73). In this sense, the body is not
unique, but open, constructed by the multiple meanings of the connection. There are
cyberdata flowing through it and beyond it, in direct contact, invisible, intangible net
sensations. It is freedom to relax the boundaries that transform the organic into a cyborg, and
a cybrid body. Skin with cloud data that are perceived and experienced by the sharing of
information coming from computers.
Camila Hamdan ritualized her body, and gave it away to the copyleft tattoos - the
body was both the skin and the open interface to external eyes of cameras and projections that
virtualize her label or tag in a form of fantastic imagination, as for the global brain that
transmits her painted body transformed in a biocybrid reality. Virtual images are embodied
in a single existential context of the process of the body as an interface that promotes new
sensory syntheses of the flesh, beyond the biological. Trials of post-human, post-organic,
post-biological, neo-biological, transhuman, from the effects of biofeedback, recontextualize
life as well, "lent wings to that love, because we feel for instinct that, in the sphere of
happiness, our bodies shall enjoy the right to cross the room as the bird through the air "(
BACHELARD, 1990, p. 68). Hamdans artwork proposes the premisse of natural flesh ,
artificial wing, and the binomial nature / cultural if we take the symbolic unconscious desire
to fly represented in the performative ritual of tattooing the flesh in the hidden code of the
Tag in augmented reality - copyleft - the code is the unique way for sharing her body in the
network, breaking with the structure of craft practices and maintaining anthropological links
by the body in copyleft.
BioArt and biocybrid systems

Biofeedback provides mutual behaviors of body signals and the environment. It
involves sensory physiology and cognitive processes that result from the analysis of actions of
intertwined body/environment, and their exchanges of information. Our recent artworks at
LART in collaboration with the scientific team of researchers of LEI (Laboratory of
Engineering and Innovation) at Gama University of Brasilia, investigate the redefinition of
human perception and cognitive process, dealing with body physiology and immediate
physical environment. We are looking for the systematic structuring of the relations between
sensory patterns ultimately derived from manufactured sensor technologies and those given
by locomotion, heat, heart beats and breathing, by taking the internal paradigms and the
parameters they should result in those contingencies leading to the externalization of a percept
(Krueger, 2004).
In a previous artwork, Diana Domingues developed Heartscapes
(Domingues, 2003b), where she offers an immersive experience and enhancing biofeedback
interactions at the recently installed LART CAVE. The biocybrid system includes the use of a
variety of multi-sensory interfaces by tactile, breath, body signals transmitted by sensors,
heart beats and electrical potentials of electrooculogram. The researches of Prof. Adson
Ferreira da Rocha should configure a more complex biocybrid zone of body and artificial
system within the synthetic landscape of the heart. But our interest is to use biofeedback, and
assistive technologies in artworks are focusing on new forms of art involving the extension of
technological innovation and medical signals in mobile urban mixed life. By understanding
the organization of embodied interaction and public spaces in mobile technologies worlds,
the use of assistive technologies and e-health by taking human biosignals as traces for
communicate human of life should help any person with any ability or disability, to achieve
greater independence at all levels, at home, at work, in normal life.
Biocybrid Wearable Art System (BWAS) mobile network system of biofeedback
Our artworks in wearable art and biocybrid systems in LART use technological
innovation regarding the miniaturization of hardware systems that have enabled the
development of network sensor nodes, which allow new applications for interconnected
wireless networks. According to Carvalho (2005), those sensors have the ability to detect or
measure some phenomenon of nature, processing and transmitting data or information to other
sensors. In our artworks the circuit of sensors a node of sensors are built in an intelligent
network sensor inserted in a set of women's accessories - rings, bracelets, visors, or other
wearables - which coupled to bodies configure a Biocybrid Wearable Art System (BWAS),
that allows people to monitor, process and send to other biosensors vital signals information
and data over a long period of time. Biosignals connections in cyberspace expand body life in
physical space and it is configured the biocybrid condition . In this direction we are
collaborating for the technological innovation in Art and Technoscience, in the field of
Software Art, BioArt, Wearable Art, Device Art, developing interfaces: hardware and
software. In the case of BWAS, with mobile wireless node of biosensors using non-invasive
sensors for the body, we use the capture of electrophysiological signals of galvanic skin
resistance, and sensors for acquisition and transmission of breath and heartbeats.
The biocybrid condition regulated by biofeedback is very shamanic in the sense it
gives the power to capture biological information from the body moving in the physical
space , and they exchange energies (Domingues, 1997) Body and environment send signals
and the system is performed by inputs and outputs of wireless sensors embodied in a network
area (ROCHA et al., 2008). New states emerging from the body in the environment connected
to cyberspace and governed by the experience of its presence status in reciprocal behavioral
changes reaffirm the enactive interface by the very alive human condition transduced by the
sensorial physiology of the body and the qualities of urban life in which the enaction occurs.
The structure of the sensory-motor interfaced subject contextualized by mobile devices in the
urban space determines how to act and be modulated by events in the environment. These
results , in the near future, biocybrid systems will allow to interact with every thing, with
everybody, with every space, with everywhere, with nobody to interact with - pictures,
sounds, texts, films, embedded in the urban space, by sharing internal and external signals,
feelings , believes, values, emotions and desires, during rituals - the flneur is alive and
located in the landscape , in urban space and expand the vital signals to life.
FINAL COMMENTS
The artistic experimentation we have carried out contributes to the development of

new perceptual experiences anticipating a future in which nanoprostheses will be integrated
into the body invisibly. Synthetic images will be embedded in our everyday reality, people
will be transferred with their bodies having been extended, modified, as mutants, tattooed, and
endowed with artificial intelligence immersed in cybrid reality (Hamdan, 2009). The artworks
denotate a close and sensitive look of women artists of the Brazilian indigenous culture. The
relationship with art and body painting reminds of the Guaycuru-Kadiweu and Kuikurus ,
who belong to ancient, large, seminomadic nation and live in Mato Grosso do Sul, and whose
body painting goes far beyond an aesthetic content, possessing magical-symbolic purposes,
and linked to their mythic-cosmological universe. The artwork theme of tattoos and biocybrid
systems have implications on social issues, because they allow the emergence of social spaces
in flexible, public and private environments. We believe in artists contribution which is close
to scientists capacity of relating mobile condition and locative interfaces innovation. Practices
in art and technoscience respond to Walter Benjamin's seminal text The author as producer,
and the perspective of an artistic sense of presence in the physical world, being mobile
networked technologies the adequate apparatus for social interventions. People use mobile
interfaces in daily life, and it is apparently bizarre that they do not take into account the fact
that they can achieve an increased sense of locatedness that they did no have before. We are
located and connected all the time and everywhere, and in calm connections. Once we are
located and connected in the world, body actions are opened to social interactions, confirming
the lesson we have learned from Weisers design of calm technology, and believing that we
will enrich not only our space but other peoples space. We are in a biocybrid world - a world
as an ecosystem, with which we have mutual exchanges, we influence each other, most of the
time in our lives we are connected to machines, to the environment, and to other people as we
have never experienced before. The sense to be alive and to be here or there, that is, to be
located, is not the same. We are co-located in physical and cyberworlds. The internal body
and the signs of our life in the very sense of biology: breathing, heart beats, heat, and other
transductions to data in cyberspace affect the environment. Now the notion of body lies in
mutual exchanges between body/environment coming from biofeedback systems which
generate the biocybrid zone of our existence. Thus, interface design is a central issue for an
artist in collaborative practices with scientists in order to attain a more humanly empowered
condition, and to define the ultimate nature of our body and social life.
Figuras
Fig. 1: Living Tattoos, 3D Modeling - Diana Domingues - NTAV Lab / CNPq, Brazil, 2008.
Fig. 2: Living Tattoos, Diana Domingues - NTAV Lab / CNPq, Brazil, 2008.
Fig. 3: Opened Body Connection Camila Hamdan LART, Brazil, 2009.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Notes:
1
This text is part of the reseaches related to the grant of Prof. Dr. Diana Domingues - Pesquisador Visitante Nacional
Senior CAPES. UNB- Universidade de Braslia Brazil and to the scholarship of PhD Candidate Camila Hamdan of
REUNI/MEC- FGAMA UnB and to the PhD activities of the candidate Leci Augusto PPGA Arte - Universidade de
Braslia, Brazil.
2
Muniz Sodr , a Brazilian communication scientist, proposes the bios miditico, and Diana Domingues set up the concept
of cybrid bios, concerning the human condition connected to cyberspace in the era of ubiquitous computing.
3
LART - Research Laboratory of Art and TechnoScience, CAPES - CNPq -PPGArte - FGA-Gama University of Brasilia,
Brazil.
4
The cyberperformance was realized at the Museum of Image and Sound / MIS, during the IV International Festival of
Mobile Creativity / Mobilefest, on november 14th, 2009, in So Paulo / SP. Collaborators: Dra. Diana Domingues, Tiago
Franklin, Juan Arteiro, Roni Ribeiro and Nycolas Albuquerque. Acknowledgments: Dr. Oliver Dyens, Paulo Hartman, Team
Mobilefest 2009 and the Museum of Image and Sound / MIS-SP.
5
<body>. National Museum of the Republic, Braslia, Brazil, 2008.
6
Reference to Diana Domingues artwork Living Tattoos.
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2010CIMUAT Espana Ddoming Hamdan August Ingles FINAL LART

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DOMINGUES, Diana; HAMDAN, Camila; AUGUSTO, Leci. Biocybrid Body and Rituals in Urban Mixed Life.

Authors: Diana Domingues, Camila Hamdan, Leci Augusto

Title: Biocybrid body and rituals in urban mixed life1

We propose that the connected body

Artists/engineers - collaborative practices and technological inventions

implications, culminating in her theory

conventional and implicitly dualist concept of human-computer interaction and propose a

GPS, biosensors, computer vision, and other devices are always

transforming us into biocybrid humans.

Tattoos artwork and urban mixed life

network through streaming as a CyberTV. The

cyberperformance configures the relationship between human, computer, and the

BioArt and biocybrid systems

In a previous artwork, Diana Domingues developed Heartscapes

The artistic experimentation we have carried out contributes to the development of

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