Designer Creates Jewellery That Sucks Power From Human Veins

We've just come across a fascinating, potentially terrifying story online – designer and 'trend theorist' Naomi Kizhner has created a series of jewellery that plugs directly into your veins, converting your body's motion into electricity.  Kizhner has made three pieces; 'The Blinker', 'The E-Pulse Conductor' and – our favourite – 'The Blood Bridge'.

The devices are inserted through the skin and directly into the veins – there they utilise the blood flow of the wearer, turning parts contained within the jewellery to generate electricity. Calling the project 'Energy Addicts', Kizhner says that the work is a response to dwindling resources, and an examination of the potential to use humans as a commodity. Writing on her website, she avers that Energy Addicts is "a speculative a project that responds to a possible future of depleting resources. The work delves into a world in which there is a significant decline, which forces humanity to seek all the more forcefully for alternative ways of cultivating power. The suggested solution to the dilemma is based on the idea of biological wealth, harvesting energy directly from the body. using invasive gold & biopolymer devices that must be embedded into the surface of the skin, simple movements performed by the subconscious are fully utilized."

Here's the E-Pulse in diagram –

Having got over how much the devices remind us of the vampiric artifact at the heart of del Toro's weird horror classic Cronos, the more dystopian minded members of the Ransom Note office (ie me) are already envisaging a future where the poor will be required to 'harvest' their energy to maintain the massively fuel consuming electrical products of the rich. But that would never happen, right? Kizhner herself seems to enjoy creating uncomfortable conclusions, telling Cosmopolitan in a recent interview that she “wanted to provoke thought about how far will we go to in order to ‘feed’ our addiction in the world of declining resources…. I wanted to explore the post-humanistic approach that sees the human body as a resource… Will we be willing to sacrifice our bodies in order to produce more energy?”

With no tech specs published on her website, it's hard to tell how serious Kizhner is at making a genuine power source, and how much is simply done to provoke – although with science so often following science fiction, we doubt this is the last we'll hear of harvesting body energy…