Fossil fuels are becoming scarcer and harder to extract. We are going to have to develop and use novel technologies to overcome the eventual energy shortages. Industrial designer Naomi Kizhner has probably proposed the most novel approach of all -- extract and harvest that energy from our own bodies, using jewellery implants that double up as kinetic-energy sucking devices.
Kizhner is a graduate student from Hadassah College in Jerusalem, who describes herself as "a trend theorist that is looking to define the new black -- practicing everyday escapism".
Kizhner explains on her website that Energy Addicts, her final year project, "seeks to deal with questions of how to see the world, based primarily on biological energy and what the meaning of biological capital is when the accrual is contingent on biological data".
What would happen to our ethical constructs, asks Kizhner, when "the person is actually a natural resource". A video accompanying the project depicts this future world, in which women sit, lethargic, their breathing measured and deep, presumably depicting how every exertion is now quantified.
The project covers three devices tailored for harvesting our energy. There is the Blinker, which extracts energy -- as you might expect -- from every blink of our eyelids. It's crafted from an elegant gold shell that cups the arc of our nose. It has a biopolymer cover and a "micro energy cell" where the energy is presumably stored after being attracted to the gold and iron electromagnetic.
Now if you think having slim gold lines hovering over your eyelids might be uncomfortable, how about inserting a hypodermic needle into your lower arm so that your blood can be circulated on a gold "micro turbine". According to Dezeen, the Blood Bridge is a kind of decorative bypass that generates energy as your blood flows through the wheel to turn it, while the E-Pulse Conductor is inserted into the veins near your spine and picks up electrical pulses. Both are secured with clinical glue to the body, to sit flush against your flesh.
It might seem all rather creepy, inserting needles into the body to extract any scraps of energy we can. But there are groups today that willingly implant magnets under their flesh in the hope of accelerating their transformation to full-on cyborg.
Technology is positioned to make our lives easier and more streamlined, so Kizhner's appraisal of the series as tools that will make extracting energy from blinking, blood pressure and nerve activity as "effortless", somewhat bridges those two worlds -- the tech-driven and impatient inhabitants of the 21st-century, and our future cyborg selves.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
