Haus-Rucker-Co was an Austrian design studio formed by Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp, and Klaus Pinter. Across the 1960s and 1970s, they created a series of experimental architectural interventions that aimed to change people’s perception of the urban environment through wearable, portable, and sometimes even edible designs. The Flyhead Helmet pictured here was part of their Mind Expanding Program project from 1967 to 1971, a green tinted helmet which refracted the user’s vision into a prism accompanied by headphones that disoriented their hearing. The group’s other projects included edible models of cities that they invited audiences to consume in public performances, and huge PVC balloons suspended from the top floor of a building that could support two people and a bathtub. 

Haus-Rucker-Co’s wearable design appears mostly decorative next to today’s smart devices that accumulate and exchange data with remarkable speed. Indeed, the candy colors and hallucinatory sensibility of the collective’s projects would be unimaginable outside the cultural atmosphere in the 1960s that combined hippie culture with growing anxieties about urban and air pollution. But perhaps Haus-Rucker-Co’s motivations weren’t so far off from that of today’s IoT when considering their interest in network theory, a nascent idea during their time which provided not merely a functional but idealized model for social cohesion. It expanded the dual relationship between viewer and object, including artwork, towards a plural context of countless agents and nodes of information connecting them. In fact, many of the collective’s apparatuses were “intended to be networked to other objects (and their wearers)” (Ross Elfine, “Common Ground: Haus-Rucker-Co’s Food City I and Collaborative Design Practice”) — the wearer of the flyhead helmet would not only tap into an alternate experience of the world but was expected to share their experience with wearers of other wearable devices like the Drizzler and Viewatomizer.

Switch “share” with “exchange” and “experience” with “information,” and we make a surprisingly quick transition to our IoT. But this switch is precisely what deserves more scrutiny. Somewhere along the line, early network enthusiasts’ emphasis on play — with all its irreducible subjectivity and spontaneity — has become an empty facade for the strictly controlled parameters of today’s technological agents, both human and nonhuman.