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Responsive wearable goggles by Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chebyshev.

super-i presents itself as a pair of wearable goggles with a camera on front. There’s a little box containing some electronics that let you apply different filters to the image from the camera before feeding it back to the goggles, so that you can experience the world as seen through photoshop-style filters, or - and this is what makes it interesting - as ascii art!

This piece was featured on Slashdot as “realtime ASCII Goggles” and after that all over the place, but most of them failed to dig up what it’s called and who did it, presenting it as made by “some russian artists”. Shame!

The artists are Shulgin and Chebyshev, people. Find out more at www.critipop.com and easylife.org.

Shulgin is also one of the founders of runme.org, an archive of software art.

All you see is light

Interactive art piece with Arijana Kajfes at Interactive Institute (2004)

Monochromeye is part of a larger art driven project, occular witness, in which the artist Arijana Kajfes has been investigating properties of light as an artistic material and as a carrier of information. Monochromeye is a wearable optical machine, consisting of a semitranslucent helmet and a pointing device that fits on your index finger. The finger piece picks up colors (using sensors for red, green and blue light) and transmits it to the light emitting diodes right before your eyes. What you see is not an image, but a pure color. This deprivation of resolution (and context) forces the viewer/wearer to find new strategies of forming meaning from the limited information that is available. Monochromeye is one of the pieces in the exhibition Touching the Invisible. My contribution to monochromeye was in making the electronics and programming the onboard microprocessor.

The larger project Occular Witness was awarded an honorary mention in the interactive arts category at Ars Electronica (2006). They even liked this picture enough that they used it as the logo for the Interactive Art category in 2007.