Body Modification and the “Internet of Things”

16 Horsepower, by Meghan Trainor, is a performance piece in which Trainor scans pieces of ceramic and graphite embedded with RFID tags to trigger different sounds from an audio database culminating in a series of tracks triggered by a RFID chip in her arm. This piece aims to help the audience understand and imagine the coming “Internet of Things” as well as emerging capabilities to modify the human body.

Trainor collaborated with ceramicist Michelle Anderson and programmer Stephen Koch. Anderson created 16 ceramic plumb bobs that walk a line between handmade and mass-produced objects. Koch built an application in Flash that allows her to rapidly and easily create and manage audio dense RFID projects. This piece will be debuted at the upcoming Ask the Robot show on June 4th, 2006.

Previous RFID projects: With Hidden Numbers, 2005 [video], Radio Frequency Remix, 2005 [video], RFID Project, 2004 [video].