Reykjavík, Iceland
Sruli Recht, a Reykjavík-based artist and designer known for challenging the norm through art, has come up with the innovative idea to design futuristic footwear.
The Damage Capsule Collection of post-prosthetics speculates footwear for an oncoming world, employing passive, bio, non-electric technology.
This shoe, self-tightening, illuminated, seamless, suggested a new world of footwear—automatic, electric, visually slick and intuitively void of the need to touch.
In each of these concepts, Recht takes the body as the starting point and uses it as a frame of reference to extend the functions already present.
For example, “VENICE_HEEL—HI/Lo Tide” looks at the swelling floods of Venice, & imagines a shoe for walking in deep water.
Sruli Recht. “VENICE HEEL for HI_LO Tide”
Recht states: “We watched in awe as the tides rose with increasing regularity. As the planet heated, we learned that not only did the polar caps melt, but warmer water actually expanded.”
“The oceans rose at twice the rate we anticipated and now any coastal inhabited areas flood often.”
“Sometimes the tide goes out—and sometimes it is permanent.”
“We named it The Swell.”
And as such, newer shoes were developed.
Prosthetics for the water.
The Hi-Tide and Lo-Tide prosthetics, VENICE HEEL slang, were a simple solution to an unsolvable problem.
“Part keel, part stilt, we wade directionless through the flowing swollen global waters.”
“Step by strangely keeling step.”
The “VENICE HEEL for HI/LO Tide” fit over the wearers current shoe and allow the user to navigate the hi or low flow of city street water.
Sruli Recht. “VENICE HEEL for HI_LO Tide”
Next, “PHASE_CHANGE” presents a passive cooling vascular system that chills the body without any energy use.
Recht. conceived that a body heat-powered cooling prosthetic could generate blood cooling from something in the shoe.
This was achieved by inventing a phase change substance that was liquid below 35 degrees C, and a gas above it.
Sruli Recht. “PHASE_CHANGE
By running a series of flexible pipes under the hot footbed, the body heat would turn the fluid to a gas, which would then rise and flow into tubes on the outside of the shoe, thereby cooling outside the body.It would then flow back down again to the footbed as a cold fluid, ready to continue the cycle, like an organism’s circulatory system.
In “Un_BALANCED,” Recht. addresses the ageing populations terminal balance problems.
“Throughout human history,” states Recht, “as the older generations aged, they lost mobility through a sensitivity drop in their hands and feet.”
Sruli Recht. “Un_BALANCED”
“Now was no different, we could engineer ourselves to look good and feel good, but, short of a total vascular overhaul, we would still be losing our balance. The number one cause of death in the elderly to this day happens from what we call ‘terminal balance disorder.’ Some mobile prune falls over because of the insensitivity in their feet. They become bed ridden while healing, a clot forms, moves around the body and ka-pow. ‘Knock-knock,’ from the Reaper.”
“And now, the biggest fear among our undying ancestors is a simple case of losing balance and falling over.”
Recht’s solution came with a sensory prosthetic: a shoe that counter-intuitively created a balance regulation in the brain through presenting the illusion of instability.
The trick was found when we noticed that walking on unstable surfaces—like rocky ground, loose pebbled areas or sand—that when the body registered the uneven surface, the brain would create an automatic switch to re-regulate the body, like a gyro. A hologram of stability.
Project: The Damage Capsule Collection
Artist: Sruli Recht
Photographers: Marinó Thorlacius
