Exo-Voice & Exo-Shoe: Onyx Ashanti Creates Incredibly High Tech 3D Printed ‘Footware’ & More

The creative process is, above all, a process. Good art, just like any creation worth having, is worth waiting for. Onyx Ashanti, a native of Mississippi, is all about the iterative process in his creative works, and has been developing “beatjazz” for several years, even doing a TED talk on the topic in 2011–and he just gave another TED talk, on a different subject, last month.

This “multidimensional expression concept” extends across any number of platforms, just as versatile as Ashanti himself, as he is a “musician, Programmer, 3d print-designer, writer, performer, inventor…a self described child of the internet, and disciple of the open source philosophy.”

Two of Ashanti’s recent projects–both of which have been in the works, at least conceptually, for some years now–have recently caught our eye here at 3DPrint.com. Ashanti, who has been doing work in discovering the nature of the cyborg, told us via email about his the exo-voice.

“the details are that this is a design abstraction of my current cyborg sonic interface, the exo-voice,” Ashanti tells us in his characteristic lower-case type. “the system allows me to interact with sound kinesthetically. it is currently being mutated into a daily wear system with a sonic OS (beatjazzOS) to investigate how sound can be used to interface with what we think of as reality and program new ones at will, in realtime, on the go, hence my interest in biomechanical interfacing, function and aesthetic, ie, its about to get very much more strange than this.”

The descriptive page on his website is an experiential marvel in itself (be sure to listen to the provided track at the top of the page as you read–Ashanti also includes warnings to be careful if listening while driving, as the music is binaural and can thus seem jarring). The exo-voice, still a work-in-progress as Ashanti revisits the ideas behind it and the capabilities of the system, has been in the works for around two years now and the artist shows no signs of slowing.

The exo-voice explores “sonomorphology” which uses sounds to experience changes and feelings, in a nutshell. He’s brought 3D printing into play for the sensors since the initial iteration of the idea. As he noted on Facebook, “it can be 100% printed, sensors, wires and all, it feels unlike any interface ive ever worn or designed, allowing for full finger motion in all directions…”

From head to foot, Ashanti’s artistic visions have you covered.

He also let us know that he “just dropped [his] modular platform for biomechanical foot investigation a short while ago.” The exo-foot, Ashanti’s “new type of footwear,” is so high-tech that he considers it not just footwear–but “footware.” He shies away from using the word “shoe” to describe his creation, but it is a “100% 3d printed, modular, bio-mechanical foot interface.”

That 100% is only slightly overblown, as there are two metal pins in the current version of the exo-shoe (which Ashanti “will sort out in future iterations”). The idea had been percolating for around three years, but last summer he started actual design work, and then picked it up again now in the spring–because who doesn’t think about more open footwear as the warmer months hit?–and Ashanti notes significant improvements to his second iteration. This version is more comfortable, easier to put on (it snaps together), and the design is modular.

His work, published April 13, on his blog, on the exo-shoe is incredibly involved from start to finish.

In beginning the work on the exo-shoe, Ashanti started at the very beginning with a question not many of us have ever truly stopped to think about: “what IS a shoe?” This question isn’t nearly so straightforward as it might first seem: “re they foot protection?  are they a status symbol? are they a cultural identifier? are they a magic spell meant to bind you within a a certain range of movements?  once I began asking questions about them I started getting strange answers back, in my head.”

Ashanti took a look at the movement of a bare foot compared to one in shoes, and sought to keep closer to the nature of walking–and it was then that he “realized that it could not be a shoe.” In seeking to balance out weight distribution more according to body nature–that is, more toward the forefoot than on the heel–Ashanti began several years of research into what might be like a shoe without being a shoe. His first thought, a fairly soft covering, wasn’t great; in fact, he notes, “this immediately sucked…hard.” With everything about that design fairly painful, he looked back at his exo-voice mask–and so was born the idea of the exo-foot as it is currently developing.