I make new ways of living with computers.

We used to live close to things.

Now I tap this piece of glass and they promise that's enough.

How do we use emerging technology to make people feel more present in their own body?

01 · Life computing instrument

Percy

Percy is a screenless recording device.

Most small recorders are designed around meetings and productivity. Percy begins with a different question: What else could a computer become?

Percy wearing an existing small recorder on his collar

A cat wearing the same existing small recorder on its collar

Early form-factor tests using an existing PLAUD NotePin. The final Percy hardware is in development.

Percy wakes when it is placed in an activator. An activator can live on a dog's collar, a guitar strap, a sketchbook, or anything connected to a grounded way of thinking.

A working recorder exists

02 · Codex plugin

ZineMaker

Print a zine by talking to your agent.

A request becomes an eight-page zine, a browser edition, and one foldable sheet of paper. Print it, fold it, write on it, and hand it to someone.

Open the Codex plugin ↗

Loops While You Sleep zine, made with ZineMaker — Loops While You Sleep, a real eight-page zine made through the plugin.

03 · Installation

Project Telephone

An honest installation. A telephone booth on a college drillfield. Pick up a telephone & leave a message.

Listen to the voices ↗

The question

What do you need the most right now? Who do you wish to call?

04 · Data sonification

Akutan

Twenty years of earthquake data from Akutan Volcano became a one-minute piece.

Data sonification turns research data into sound. Here, time controls when a voice enters, magnitude controls loudness, and depth controls pitch.

05 · Industrial design

Lifeform

A maple tool for experiencing your life in the sand.

See the complete project ↗

The Lifeform maple object and its engraved instructions in sand

The carved bottom of the maple Lifeform object beside Kasra making it — The carved bottom of the form presses memories into the sand.

Take off your shoes.
Consider your life, everything that's progressed until now.
Keep walking and pressing until the sand knows your story.
Walk again, this time into your future.
Once your life is complete, leave the sand behind.
Watch as your life fades away.

The cold of the stone. A neighbor's hug.

The weight of something you made with your hands, the exhausted satisfaction after a long run, the borderline-celestial presence in your love's eyes.

I think the body knows things the screen can't teach.

I don't want technology that saps us out of our bodies. I want technology that makes us feel more slowly, deeply, richly human.

Read Computergrass

Computergrass

by Kasra C. Mikaili

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature”Percy Mikaili

Whoever wishes to build a computer
should study this one that I once saw.

It was April.
We were in a garden,
and the computer lay open in the grass.
The mouth of the computer was
opened wide.

II.

It had no keyboard,
or mouse or screen.
It grew in the grass,
filled with roses,
roses up and down.

III.

Whoever wishes to build a computer
should study this one that I once saw.

The computer that grew in the grass.

"O computer,
what can you do?"

Percy, a young labradoodle,
responds, "Computers
can do so much more
than work.

Much more than that
clock-stiffening rubber
of a dayjob.

Computers are
softer than rubber."

IV.

Whoever wishes to build a computer,
must be happy and live well.

Computers are breathing devices,
inhale and exhale.
The garden does not ask us
to be useful.

The computer grew fur.

A fur-furred creature.
A beast who was my friend.
A lion, then a horse,
who offered a ride.

The computer of life
loved being alive.

VI.

An egg cracks on my head,
then yours.

We watch the yolk

trick-
le

down

us,

shivering

smooth-
ly.

There were no words between me,
and you, but we cried in this
garden

as the yolk
trickled down.

We cried, and cried,
and cried over
electric grass.