This pairing is grossly unequal. Sidi Larbi is a dancer of exceptional vitality and versatility. His partner, made by artist Antony Gormley and nicknamed Ibral, can’t move a step without external influence. Yet the tension between them makes the partnership more dynamic than any solo.

It’s an indication of one’s ignorance to say that all crash test dummies look the same. It’s easy to tell the difference when you get to know them . For example, the suspended one (below) has specially modified hips which allow it to sit upright on a train seat. Yes, there are indeed experiments where trains are crashed to see how they can be made safer, and the experts at TRL (the Transport Research Laboratory) know exactly how to prepare the dummies to extract the right information.

The keen-eyed will notice that the two dummies in the background also look a little different. They once held down good jobs as motorcycle crash test dummies. However, they got knocked about so much that they don’t cut the mustard any more. Today they are merely “make-weights” - strapped into vehicles that need a full complement of inert passengers for a realistic crash test.

The lesson is clear. Don’t judge a dummy by its looks. Take a little time and get to know it. You may be surprised by how much you have in common.

Dummies are, on the whole, passive servants of our bidding. They will wear what we ask and sit when they are told. There is one, however, that has to be told quite firmly. In fact, it is asking to be hit. Often.
This manikin is called SlamMan. We came across it in a barn in Kent, England. It’s fully-wired and includes a microchip, which is the nearest a dummy can get to having a brain.
This gives it just enough intelligence to switch on different lights around its torso and head, showing exactly where it wants to be hit. Or maybe the lights go on wherever it is hit. We don’t know for sure because half of its wiring was hanging out so we couldn’t try it out.

SlamMan is the docile training partner for solitary martial arts practitioners. It gives them the opportunity to improve their reactions and the accuracy of their punches, thumps, slaps and kicks.

To be fair, it shouldn’t really have a place in this blog because, despite its undoubted resilience, it is clearly only half a man. The top half, to be precise. But it looks so peculiar, like a punch-drunk boxer who’s lost all awareness of where he is, that he deserves a little recognition because he could never, ever, be a contender.

The figure on the right is a scientist at Queen Mary, University of London. The figure on the left is a hollow “phantom”. The chamber in which they stand excludes electromagnetic radiation.

The scientist fills the phantom with fresh lamb meat. He buries a small antenna in the meat and triggers it to send and receive radio signals.
The aim is to design an antenna for implantable medical devices for insulin delivery, pacemaker regulation, cardiac defibrillation and bowel control.
The perfected antenna will improve patient comfort because the implanted devices will then be totally free from wires. A nurse or doctor will be able to monitor and regulate the wireless device inside the patient from their office down the corridor.
But first the scientists must be confident that signals to and from the antenna propagate efficiently and do not affect human body tissue.
Each experiment must stop after four hours. After that point, the meat is no longer fresh enough to have the same properties as living human flesh.
A virtual phantom – a computer model – is being constructed so soon the experiments will be able to continue without visits to the butcher.
In a previous life, the phantom was used to test the electromagnetic radiation from police radio handsets. That’s why its hand is in front of its face.

Emergency service staff have always trained hard to work efficiently under extreme conditions. Now they can practice rescuing extremely overweight people with a training dummy weighing 28 stone (178 kg).

It’s made by the same people who produce the rather slimmer marine rescue training dummy we featured in Wet and is designed to be carried by up to six people. According to the company’s web site, “Obesity is a very real problem in the UK and across the world and judging by government figures the problem is getting worse, [so] rescue teams will need to consider how they will deal with casualties of this size and this dummy will enable realistic training to take place. We have worked very hard to achieve a ‘fluidity of movement’ with the weight rather than just producing a heavy ‘lump’, so we think it will be very realistic to work with.”

One day we hope to meet this fat manequin in person, properly described as “bariatric”, but, until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with these strangely unsettling pictures, courtesy of the svelt people at Ruth Lee Ltd and the BBC.

.

It seems, from the comments we’ve been getting, that inanimate dummies evoke sympathy. What’s wrong with you people? Dummies are slightly creepy artifacts made by humans to help us in one way or the other. They’re not some cute cuddlesome honeybun. It’s the people who have to work with them that should be getting the sympathy.

Take Annie, for example. She’s the one on the right. She’s a resuscitation training doll used to show volunteers how to bring cardiac arrest sufferers back to life from their near death experiences. The lady on the left, a wonderful member of the marvelous St John Ambulance, has to blow into Annie’s mouth and beat her chest more frequently and forcefully than is decent.

And no matter how hard she’s tried over the years, she has never yet managed to bring Annie back to life. Nor have the hundreds of trainees who’ve also pumped and thumped the manikin.

So who deserves the sympathy here? The ungrateful rubber effigy or the hard-working instructor?

Mind you, Annie is about to get what she deserves. Health & Safety officials have deemed her too heavy so lighter versions are taking her place. And the dumb blond will be locked in a suitcase for the rest of eternity. Aaaah.

This is one dummy we haven’t yet met and certainly wouldn’t want at the steering wheel of a moving car. He’s called Oscar and he sits in luxury cars, freezing to death or sweating buckets. His job is to reveal the efficiency of aircon systems in cars that are still in development. He’s covered in nasty looking sensors that detect temperature, humidity and draughts. Regular human beings used to do the job but they needed lunch breaks, holidays and wages. Oscar will work 24/7 and doesn’t complain, often. Maybe that’s because he has a small metal cage sticking out of his mouth.

Dancer Akram Khan sits on himself, an articulated effigy he nicknamed Marka which was made by Antony Gormley (see the Pixelated post). They’re in a brilliant piece called Zero Degrees, alongside Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and another manikin, with music by Nitin Sawhney. Go to see it.

]]> http://quitehuman.com/2007/10/16/akram-marka/feed/ quitehuman Akram Khan from quitehuman.com http://quitehuman.com/2007/10/08/expecting/ http://quitehuman.com/2007/10/08/expecting/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:54:56 +0000 quitehuman http://quitehuman.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/expecting/

At last, you may be thinking, just what I expected to see on a blog dedicated to dummies - a crash test dummy. Well, yes it is, but we do try to be unpredictable so it’s not your ordinary run of the mill, mindless serial impact victim.

This is, we believe, unique. It’s the only pregnant crash test dummy in the world. This immaculate model was conceived from a passion to understand how car seat belts might be redesigned to give better protection to expectant mothers. It’s surprising that nobody had considered improving the safety of pregnant women in cars before.

Standard belts can be uncomfortable when you’ve got a bump with a baby inside so some women choose not to strap in at all, increasing their risk of injury at a time when they really want to be even safer. So this female has a water-filled container inserted above her pelvis to mimic the foetus. Then she is accelerated up to 50 mph (80 kph) and brought to a sudden halt, just to see which kinds of belts work best.

If you were a crow, which of the figures below would scare you most? Probably neither. The chap on the left was on the books of Chelsea FC 50 years ago, earning £2.50 a week. Today he keeps an immaculate allotment for growing vegetables and he built the figure on the right, called Fred, to scare the crows away. It’s made from pair of his old trousers and his old t-shirt, with a scarf knitted by his wife. The tranquil scene, with cricketers walking out to play on the field beyond, belies its recent history. The local council had tried to turn all of the allotments into a car park but eventually changed its mind after a fierce community campaign to save them. Now Fred can stand guard over neatly tilled rows of onions, spuds and beetroot.