Space Suits and Gas Masks: Mary Ann Scherr and an Alternative View of Personal Technology

Abstract

Summary The development of commercial, wearable biosensors since the 1970s has been promoted as a rhetoric of optimization, in which one’s body can be improved through harnessing information. The wearable biosensor can therefore be understood as a tool of biomedicalization, in which patients are turned into consumers and health is a personal responsibility. This paper argues for a radical alternative vision of biosensors through an unexpected precursor, the American metalsmith Mary Ann Scherr (1921–2016). In the early 1970s Scherr debuted a series of ‘body monitoring’ jewellery. This jewellery responded both to a cybernetic notion of technological control as well a burgeoning ecological movement that positioned the body as porous—and therefore vulnerable—to its environment. A product of the studio craft and industrial design worlds, Scherr married function with a keen appreciation for adornment and sensuality. Scherr’s body monitors offer an alternative vision to the rhetoric of optimization, one that balances a desire for control through information with an emphasis on embodied form born through a sensual attention to physical experience.