Our friends at We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com saw a remarkable speaker at a recent body hacking conference in Germany (why don’t these conferences ever come to the US?). Here are some notes from the talk — WMMNA has much more, with links:
A few years ago, Quinn Norton had a magnet implanted in the tip of one of her fingers. The ring finger to be precise because it’s a nerve-rich area of the body. After some time she started to sense electro-magnetic fields, she could feel the hard drive spin up under the load seconds before her laptop began stalling, she could could tell if an electrical cord was live, feel running motors, security devices, etc. She explained that very rapidly her brain had adapted and developed a sixth sense. The idea was pioneered by body-mod artists Jesse Jarrell and Steve Haworth.
Two months after the magnet was inserted, the implant area became infected and her sixth sense disappeared…
…According to Norton, RFID implants are not interesting. There is no functional difference between carrying an rfid tag around and implanting it.
[She’s] interested in an implated glucometer whose data could be continuously uploaded to the net. Enhancement vs. treatment: She thinks that the question is often really arbitrary: it’s a treatement if you want to get to the level everyone else is at. Anything beyond that is regarded as unethical.
More from journalist and body-modder Quinn Norton, writing in Wired…
Flashback: Quinn Norton on open-source prosthetics…