distractions II (forks for all!)

today's word:
horripilation - goose bumps

i thought this one would be easy. it wasn't. after sorting through page after page of definitions for the word itself i had found very little i thought was entertaining.

there were several references to the fork of horripilation, which is apparently a quest item for a game called the elder scrolls.


i liked this:


image from the elder scrolls series of video games
if you give the Fork of Horripilation to him, he responds, "You bring the Fork! Happy day! The blind shall see! The lame shall walk! The short shall tall! Forks for all!"



i also found several references to marilyn manson. once i started looking all i could find were three year old articles about manson wanting to make movies. (manson quote: "It's horrifying, and it's depilatory. It will horrify the hair off of your legs.")

but not much more than the articles...so, i kept looking...the film in question is called phantasmagoria: the visions of lewis carroll. (and that's about all i could find.)



and while marilyn manson may be a fascinating subject, i felt i needed more. well, something that more directly related to my word for the day, anyway.

and then, buried on page 13 of the google search results i found a website called popkalab, and i thought it was pretty cool. the site belongs to artist, multimedia developer and producer, ricardo nascimento. he has a projects page, it has five projects listed, with titles like "suffering machine" and "authority" (...are you curious yet?)

but the project in question, the one that had the reference to horripilation, is called the taiknam hat, which is described as kinetic head-wear that reacts and animates to medium wave radio signals.

really.

now, go ahead and click the link for popkalab, scroll down to see the photos and below that is a link for videos of the hats in action.


Taiknam Hat, 2007, by Ebru Kurbak, Ricardo Nascimento and Fabiana Shizue


how did this relate to horripilation?
here's a bit taken from the what is the taiknam hat? page:

This project is an alternative attempt to materialize the immaterial space of radio waves by emulating horripilation, an automatic instinctive reaction of living creatures to sources of irritation and stress....
...Taiknam Hat aims to utilize the biological facts regarding the causes and properties of horripilation in birds as a metaphor, in order to express our bodies' irritation towards electromagnetic radiation as well as to create a visual and tactile signage of their existence for other people.