The promotion for this creation at the Royal College of Art’s summer graduate show was:

Hiromi Ozaki has designed a “Menstruation machine” — a wearable metal suit that allows a boy “to experience the painful bleeding of menstruation” (video embedded below). Yep, the suit is designed to release blood stored in its reservoir over the course of the cycle.

See the video here:

Menstruation Machine – Takashi’s Take from Sputniko! on Vimeo.

One graduate created an acoustic botanical garden while another created the presentation of “disc with legs” to keep your electronics away from water. No, Ozaki’s contribution is to create a device for males to experience menstruation.

Her other contribution is a device which allows you to speak to “crows”, affectionately called the Crowbot: “a robot which vocalizes a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her newly formed bird army.”

I can just hear the family: I heard Hiromi just finished up with her degree, what is she going to do now? Response: probably market her menstruation simulation machine and talk to her army of crows. I think a gallery will be showing her work this weekend.

It’s just the latest in art from this generation. Landscapes, portraits, experimentation with block art of probably so “yesterday” that modern artistic expression is now robots to simulate pain or talk to animals.

To each their own I guess, but I think I’d rather gaze upon a Monet.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/28/royal-college-art-graduate-show-menstruation-machine

http://www.di10.rca.ac.uk/hiromiozaki/crowbot-jenny.html