Anxiety Amplifier
DX Arts Course Work, 2020
Technology is becoming more and more advanced in our lives today. Artificial intelligence software and social media makes much of our personal information available online and difficult to hide or keep anonymous. With this project we speculate that technology will converge with biology, and that discrete wearables will be able to sense our emotions. We also speculate that technology will increasingly invade people’s privacy and that no information will be private. We created the Anxiety Amplifier: an anxiety-sensing shirt that acts like a second skin. The shirt senses when the user is feeling anxious and glows up the sleeves. We achieved this by attaching six LEDs to the sleeves and creating force sensors that would trigger them. When the user is feeling anxious and crosses their arms, the shirt glows. We used an ATTiny to program the LEDs and sensors. We added a tag to make the shirt seem like another everyday clothing piece people can buy at the store. We are using this piece as a way to explain how technology exposes us and also to externalize feelings of anxiety that we often feel we should hide.
AMP from Grace Barar on Vimeo.