Science, Technologies, and the Human Condition

The Center for the Humanities' year-long series — Science, Technologies, and the Human Condition — explores the ways technologies have transformed how we perceive the body, time, space, and our environment. Speakers and activities will allow students and guests to explore the relationship between moral and scientific thought and the human experience of technology.

Sara Hendren is the first speaker in the series, presenting "Waking the Machines: Art, Design, and Adaptive Technology" at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 11, in the Rosenfield Center Room 101. The event is open to the public.

Hendren is an artist, researcher, and writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She makes material and digital art works and writes about adaptive technologies and prosthetics, critical design, the medicalized and biopolitical body, and cultural representations of disability and health.

In 2012-13, Hendren completed research in the program on Art, Design, and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was also a research fellow at the MetaLAB at Harvard. Projects at various stages include:

• An investigation of the inclined plane, one of Galileo's "simple machines,"
• Cardboard carpentry,
• Personal genomics, and
• Prosthetics for invisible conditions.

Hendren runs the Abler web site.