See Yourself X (SYX) is the second volume of Madeline Schwartzman's timely series that began with See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (2011), a collection of fifty years of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses. See Yourself X focuses on the human head - our fundamental perceptual domain - presenting an array of conceptual and constructed ideas for extending ourselves physically and technologically into space. What will be the physical future of the head and the sensory apparatus in fifty years time? How will our mechanisms for communication change, prompted, as predicted by technologists, by the advancement of brain-to-brain communication? Everyone with a head should be interested in this book. SYX had inauspicious origins. In March of 2012, Schwartzman was involved in an airplane crash on the way to a book talk. The wing of her Delta MD-80 knocked over a shuttle bus at over 150 miles per hour while landing in Detroit. Luckily no one was hurt. But it did spark an investigation: do pilots feel the width of their wings - a nearly 150 foot span?
This was the catalyst for SYX: to look across art practices and contemporary culture at all ways of extending the head into space, and to move headlong into the future.