Being an exploration of Posies, silks, rings and other wearable intimacies. Touch a ring or other tagged object to the NFC reader to receive a secret note. Follow on Twitter @intimatefields
Intimate Fields is an installation work that brings together “near field” technologies from different eras (early modern England and today) to argue that secrecy, absence, and distance are constituting features of felt human intimacy. It expands to digital technologies the 16th and 17th century concept of “the posy”—a short poem designed to be inscribed on a gifted object—and the practice of its creation and dissemination. The installation consists of a wooden box, bundled with an NFC (near field communication) reader connected to an Arduino Flora microcontroller and thermal printer. Touching the included scrolls, notes, and rings to the NFC reader generates brief poems remixed from historical and contemporary texts.
The Intimate Fields wooden box, closed, with a drawer in the front.
The Intimate Fields wooden box with the top removed, revealing papers inside.
Open wooden box, viewed from above, containing folded letters bound with thread and wax seals.
Bottom of wooden box, revealing microcontroller connected to NFC reader.
Wooden box with compartments for rings and thread, a miniature thermal printer, NFC reader, and rings.
Closeup of scrolls bound with thread and sealed with wax, with NFC stickers attached.
Intimate Fields installation displayed on a table, box open to reveal thermal printer, microcontroller, and NFC reader, with paper and textiles on the table surrounding it.
Closeup of a partially completed cross-stitch of a QR code.
Closeup of an Adafruit Flora microcontroller.
Prototyping work (2017) from Intimate Fields.
Helen J. Burgess and Margaret Simon
Helen J. Burgess: Helen is a digital humanist and electronic rhetorician who studies the interplay of electronics and traditional crafting techniques. She is currently enamored of prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device in which one speaks with the voice of an absent person or thing.
Margaret Simon: Maggie’s researches early modern English literature and culture with an emphasis on book history, history of the emotions, and women’s writing. She loves inscribed objects, intricately folded letters, and all of the material ways early modern individuals found to convey circumstances and feelings.
North Carolina State University. Intimate Fields is published by the University of Victoria Maker Lab in the Humanities as a part of their “Kits for Cultural History” series. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3631844
2016 to present
intimacy, near field technology, posies, wearables, love, textiles, printing, secrets