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A map is more than a picture, but what are artists doing about it? "Mapping" has exploded as an artistic practice. Artists are making geographic maps, psychogeographic maps, sound maps, demographic maps, data-driven maps, and emotional maps. Artists are performing maps—enacting and documenting location like never before. With the advent of new media art, GIS and mobile technologies, the concern with data collection and mapping through locative media is pursued with both romance and criticality. This article presents a dictionary of terms and projects that demonstrate the variety and complexity of these map-art practices. These projects utilize the map in a political and social dimension to produce new configurations of space, subjectivity and power. Their methodology is based on an ethics of experimentation; the map is a tool to experiment with a particular territory in specific ways in order to reach unforeseen destinations.

The inner body, the Mythological Machine and the collective body The body politic is conceived through the interaction of a body natural and mysticum body. Why do we need an invisible dimension to explain power? What is the difference between the individual and the community? What do we meant by body, identity, government, narrative or myth? Through two epistemological devises, Furio Jesi's Mythological Machine and Aby Warburg's Bildwanderung (migration of images), we attempt visualize mythologies and images as the evidence of a body collective that moves, speaks and takes infinite forms beyond ourselves. This exo body with no time or space, do not only determines our approach to concepts like truth but the very appearance of the real.

Interfaces between human and a machine are at the forefront of research in human augmentation, assistance and rehabilitation.Initial acceptance of the interface relies on its intuitiveness, while continued use over a long period of time requires reliability.Co-adaptive interfaces have gained great popularity as a viable way to compensate for various sources of instability and to facilitate human operation. Nevertheless, correct functioning of the interface relies on user adaptation, a process that can be lengthy and cognitively demanding, and not enough effort has been devoted to address the mechanisms that enable the user to learn how to efficiently interact with the interface. This work proposes a mathematical framework for studying co-adaptation in body-machine interfaces that emphasizes the role of user's learning in shaping the interaction with an adaptive interface. The framework formulates co-adaptation in a task-independent and model-free way assuming that the user and the interface co-adapt towards maximizing control efficiency. The generality of this novel framework can be exploited to simulate a variety of interaction scenarios, as knowledge of user intent or task goals is not required, it allows investigating the parameters leading to optimal co-adaptation dynamics and allows demonstrating the superiority of co-adaptation over user adaptation. ; Results incorporated in this manuscript have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie, project REBoT, G.A. No 750464, and by NIDILRR Grant Number 90REGE0005-01.

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Studies have shown that motor recovery after neurological injuries is dependent on functional reorganization. In particular, engaging muscles in skilled activities triggers a process of remodeling that could lead to improving functional outcomes. Here, we propose a novel approach for engaging targeted muscles into skilled activities while operating assistive interfaces based on wearable sensors. To enforce contribution of specific muscles to the control output of a movement-based assistive interface, we introduced a signal dependent on muscle activation as replacement of a highly correlated signal dependent on limb kinematics, as measured by a set of inertial sensors. The latter were weighted against the EMG contribution and sent as input to a linear map projecting kinematic signals onto a 2D screen. Modulation of the weighting factor allows switching from a kinematic only (assistive) to a hybrid (rehabilitative) mode by increasing or decreasing EMG contribution to the operation of the interface. ; Research supported by NIDRR grant H133E120010 and NICHD grant 1R01HD072080. Results incorporated in this manuscript have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie, REBoT, G.A. No 750464

The focus of this article will be on inserting the words of older women in prison into debates on time, agency and gendered identities in total institutions. Specifically, the article will address the complexity and contradictions of the time of 'a mediated real', and how this impacts on embodied identities within prison timescapes. This will be explored through looking at how prison-time as a 'somatic identity cipher' functions performatively in the construction of older women's identities. The article will also examine how female elders in prison become agents and negotiate techniques of discipline. The role of prison-time will be shown to be simultaneously experienced as further punishment while also being resisted as we draw out the relationship between temporality, spaces of incarceration and identification. First, we will locate the field in terms of issues of theory and method. Then we will look at performativity, identity and time in negotiating, acquiescing to and resisting the identity 'prisoner'. This will enable us to understand the role and meaning of time in relation to how females in prison are compelled to reiterate and negotiate the identity 'prisoner' within the discipline of 'the time of incarceration'. We hope to demonstrate through the voices of the women that there is no single abstract imprisoned body. These are real bodies, fleshy, sensate bodies that experience real pain; at the same time, these bodies are not simply given but also interpreted, mediated and in part constituted in social and cultural meanings. This enables us to show that the body can be both a generator and receptor of meanings.

This review article attempts to address the relationship between the natural, the machine, and the human in German Romanticism through the notion of body. Due to the extension of this European cultural movement, we will shorten our study to two episodes. The first episode corresponds to Early German Romanticism or Frühromantik. The second one is situated in the romantic period called Spätromantik, particularly, in the fantastic literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In current philosophy and literature, there are helpful elements to think about the triple relationship indicated above. The hypothesis of the work tries to show how at the heart of German Romanticism some considerations criticize the possibility of the ontological division between body and soul or res cogitans and res extensa presented by Descartes. For this reason, we reconstruct the assumptions that romantics think about nature in the framework of their challenge to the rationalistic natural sciences and their considerations on the mechanism of the time, their idea of Organicism in the Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie), and politics, as well as the idea of automation and machine present in stories and essays. In such assumptions, it can be found how the body is not thought of as a matter separate and ontologically isolated from thought, spirit, or soul. To understand this process, it seems appropriate to recover the representations that exist in German Romanticism of the natural, the human, and the machine. ; El presente trabajo de reflexión intenta abordar la relación que se establece entre lo natural, la máquina y lo humano en el romanticismo alemán, a través de la noción de cuerpo. Debido a la extensión de este movimiento cultural europeo, recortaremos nuestro estudio a dos episodios. El primero corresponde al temprano romanticismo alemán o Frühromantik y el segundo se sitúa en el período romántico denominado Spätromantik, particularmente, en la literatura fantástica de E.T.A. Hoffmann. En la filosofía y/o la literatura de estas corrientes, ...

Introduction This was a feasibility pilot study aiming to develop and validate an activity recognition system based on a custom-made body-fixed sensor and driven by an algorithm for recognising basic kinetic movements in military personnel. The findings of this study are deemed essential in informing our development process and contributing to our ultimate aim which is to develop a low-cost and easy-to-use body-fixed sensor for military applications. Methods Fifty military participants performed a series of trials involving walking, running and jumping under laboratory conditions in order to determine the optimal, among five machine learning (ML), classifiers. Thereafter, the accuracy of the classifier was tested towards the prediction of these movements (15 183 measurements) and in relation to participants' gender and fitness level. Results Random forest classifier showed the highest training and validation accuracy (98.5% and 92.9%, respectively) and classified participants with differences in type of activity, gender and fitness level with an accuracy level of 83.6%, 70.0% and 62.2%, respectively. Conclusions The study showed that accurate prediction of various dynamic activities can be achieved with high sensitivity using a low-cost easy-to-use sensor and a specific ML model. While this technique is in a development stage, our findings demonstrate that our body-fixed sensor prototype alongside a fully trained validated algorithm can strategically support military operations and offer valuable information to commanders controlling operations remotely. Further stages of our developments include the validation of our refined technique on a larger range of military activities and groups by combining activity data with physiological variables to predict phenomena relating to the onset of fatigue and performance decline.

Drawing on philosophical, neurological and cultural answers to the question of what constitutes a body, this book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. At the same time, it draws upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought in order to highlight the limitations and inadequacies of such beliefs and suggest alternative perspectives. In so doing, it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies. Illustrated with examples from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, as well as the industrial age and the recent eras of informatics, gene science and nanotechnology, Embodiment and Mechanisation highlights the ways in which technological changes have led to shifts in the definition of machine and body, investigating their shared underlying belief that all matter can be reduced to a common substance. From clockwork and cadavers to engines and energy, this volume reveals our long-standing fascination with and enduring commitment to the idea that bodies are machines and that machines are in some sense bodies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in the sociology of science and technology, embodiment, cultural studies and the history of ideas