N NOWACEK

For the past 79,850 years of evolution, the human body was humanity's primary tool for transforming the world. Over the past 150 years, the body's capacities and capabilities have been increasingly outsourced to machinery, appliances, and devices, and essentialized to eyes, ears, and fingertips.

This research examines what, exactly, constitutes a 'human' to a computer, and explores the gap between the innate capacities of the body and what technology asks of it.

A range of movement languages and practices — from sign language to crossfit, martial arts, and contemporary cultural forms like dance and slang —is part of this research and collection. Additionally, this research surveys and collects the history of human movement in industrial design and the physical choreography of tools, and the history of gesture in hardware and software. It engages ideas of interface, affordance, prosthetic, and avatar to marry movement, meaning, and device in new and experimental ways.