Gradi Calibrate

An arm-worn wearable that choreographs you through an endless calibration; a permanent beta; our infinite entanglement and becoming.

Gradi Calibrate holds you in permanent beta, a choreography of adjustment that never finishes. It keeps you close to the rail, inching toward the expected while never quite arriving. If calibration is always running, whose standards are being rehearsed, and what room is left to move on purpose?

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Year: 2025

Project creation & production supported by ACC

Material: Custom software and firmware; open-weight AI models; embedded microcontrollers; microphones; speakers and audio amplifiers; IMU; proximity and mmWave presence sensor; micro-blower and valve; 3D-printed resin; synchronized eight-channel 9:16 video

Gradi is a suite of speculative wearable intrafaces that exposes the seams in AI's promise of effortless interaction. Wendy Chun reminds us, "software is ideology;" smoothness is a decision about power made at the intraface, the seam where bodies, models, and institutions negotiate passage. The work lives in that encounter, treating AI as both medium and subject.

Each device examines a dominant logic shaping AI culture: calibration, compression, prediction, mediation. Calibration holds you in permanent beta, a choreography that never finishes. Compression lets a proxy speak through the body, offloading the effort of interaction. Prediction leans ahead of the mouth, adjusting the sayable so it fits the rail. Mediation polishes speech into identityless fluency, so you are understood everywhere and recognized nowhere.

Through interactive subversive artifacts and videos of strange use cases, Gradi misaligns tacit expectations with quiet perversion, trading frictionless and phantom integration for situated misalignments. A permanent rehearsal. It keeps noise and friction alive and felt, so what is usually optimized away can be heard again.