Steve Mann
Steve Mann (CA) is a cyborg activist and inventor.
Steve Mann (2010)
Steve Mann has, since the 80s, almost permanently been wearing a wireless computer and camera upon his body (the so-called WearComp and WearCam), of which he created different, increasingly user-friendly versions. He not only uses these techniques because they are convenient in everyday life, but also to create performances that consist of recording with his own camera those who film him with their surveillance cameras; which leads to sousveillance (=inverse surveillance), to bizarre confrontations in department stores, malls and other scanscapes. Mann uses the term reflectionism for these situationist actions. Through his long-lasting fusion with the computers on his body, Mann can, like no other, describe and interpret the psychological and social effects of that fusion.
Steve Mann is director of the ePi Lab and the FL_UI_D Lab, professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. He holds degrees from the MIT and McMaster University, and is one of the founders of MIT's Wearable Computers group in the Media Lab.
He invented, aside from the WearComp and WearCam, the hydraulophone, Sousveillance, Video Orbits and the mathematical frameworks Chirplet Transform and Comparametric Equations. Mann is credited for having initiated the moblogging movement (=mobile blogging), since he transmitted his life online almost continuously in the mid-90s. He is considered the world's first cyborg; his experiences are described in Intelligent Image Processing (2001) and Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (2001). With V2_, Mann published Experiment is Accident in The Art of the Accident (1998).
He can be reached by tapping into his left eye, at: http://www.eyetap.org or http://glogger.mobi
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
