As the world’s fossil fuels are becomingly increasingly scarce and hard to extract, it’s time to develop new technologies in harvesting energy. Naomi Kizhner, industrial designer and graduate student from Hadassah College in Jerusalem, has created a piece of jewellery that theoretically harvests energy from the wearer’s own body. Kizhner, who describes herself as “a trend theorist that is looking to define the new black — practicing everyday escapism” has made this ‘speculative’ jewellery that is embedded into the person’s veins and uses their blood to turn small wheels inside the device. The piece called Energy Addicts is her final year project and as she explained to Wired “seeks to deal with questions of how to see the world, based primarily on biological energy and what the meaning of biological capital is when the accrual is contingent on biological data”. It is however not meant as a practical source of energy but rather as a discussion piece “about how far will we go to in order to ‘feed’ our addiction in the world of declining resources.”

Consisting of three pieces of jewellery – The Blinker, The E-Pulse Conductor, and The Blood Bridge – “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.”

As Kizhner further explains, there are “lots of developments of renewable energy resources, but the human body is a natural resource for energy that is constantly renewed, as long as we are alive. 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? My intention is to provoke a discussion.”

Images: Naomi Kizhner