See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded is the second volume of
Madeline Schwartzman's timely series that began with See Yourself
Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (2011), a collection of fifty
years of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses. See Yourself
X focuses on the human head--our fundamental perceptual
domain--presenting an array of conceptual and constructed ideas for
extending ourselves physically and technologically into space. What will
be the physical future of the head and the sensory apparatus in fifty
years time? How will our mechanisms for communication change, prompted,
as predicted by technologists, by the advancement of brain-to-brain
communication? See Yourself X looks across disciplines and media at
contemporary and historical proposals for the human head, in the hope of
casting into the future.
See Yourself X explores all forms of extension of the head into space,
including new organs, hair dos, masks, head constructions and gear,
headdresses, prosthetics and helmets by a range of interaction
designers, fashion designers, photographers, illustrators, hair artists,
painters and scientists. Conceptual topics include the obliteration of
the face in fashion and art; the transformation of the head using masks,
prostheses, biological modification, and post-human displacement; the
projection of politics, power and virility via wild extensions of the
head; the translation, decoding and deployment of the brain and
dismantling of the intact body, and the representation of human traits
and psychology via the analysis and deciphering of facial features.
See Yourself X had inauspicious origins. In March of 2012, Schwartzman
was involved in an airplane crash on the way to a book talk. The wing of
her Delta MD-80 knocked over a shuttle bus at over 150 miles per hour
while landing in Detroit. Luckily no one was hurt. But it did spark an
investigation: do pilots feel the width of their wings--a nearly 150
foot span. This was the catalyst for See Yourself X to look across art
practices and contemporary culture at all ways of extending the head
into space, and to move headlong into the future. See Yourself Sensing
has been used widely at design institutions across the world. See
Yourself X, like its predecessor, will be both an exhibition in book
form, and an academic book, and will include examples of Schwartzman's
innovative head-centered pedagogy and student projects from design
programs at Columbia University and Parsons: The New School For
Design.
