Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”
Dear Empyre List - It's my great pleasure to contribute to this discussion platform on Wearable-Technologies: Cross-disciplianry Ventures. As my CV has already been distributed - I'd like to skip straight to some of the issues and questions which I have concerning the field of wearables. As a full disclosure - I'm also hoping to use this conversation to delineate (in regards to my PhD in progress) some praxis axes, and take a pulse on a nebulous field which is evolving as we write! My present PhD looks at three key areas which I hope will be discussed in relationship to wearables in the coming month: 1) materiality (what materiality defines a wearable? what are wearables made of? what are the delineating characteristics which define wearables?) which leads to the second area 2) laboratory culture in the practice of hands-on wearables making (the epistemic culture of where things are produced = what you produce) and lastly, and my entry point into the field of wearables as I can to it from performance and costume is an ongoing interest in 3) performance and performativity (how do we wear, use, network, interact, perform in/with, co-structured wearable technologies?). Perhaps we could address the most contested field, and one which seems to get re-worked in every new context specifically because of its inherent cross-disciplinary and materially hybrid nature: what materially makes a wearable? What are the limits of what we are to call the field of wearables? As Sabine Seymour's new book Functional Aesthetics might suggest upon investigation of the featured examples, we are increasingly moving away from a strict Steve Mann concept of wearing a computed to a more computationally driven notion of fashion and garments. But where do we set the limits when the production of textiles, clothing manufacturing and other level of garment/fashion/clothing production are increasingly technologized? Is a wearable a garment something with electricity? Signal input? Sensors? Or is a wearable also something which on a design, conceptual (i.e. data visualization) or practical (3D-printing) makes use of technological apparatuses. In short - where do we situate the technology in wearable technology? During the month of May 2011, -empyre soft-skinned space will be featuring a discussion of wearable technologies, means through which technology augments or enables the body in interacting with the surrounding environment. The integration of wearables that augment the body with technological capabilities permeate our diverse worlds from entertainment to the military. During a recent episode of American Idol, singer Katy Perry wore a white body suit that flickered with pink LED lights to the beat of a song with Kanye West. Just a few days ago, during a US military secret mission to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, elite Navy Blue Seals wore special goggles that allowed them to see in low light conditions and helmets installed with video cams that beamed the capture and killing of Bin Laden in real time for the President of the United States and other onlookers in the White House Situation Room. In the realms of art and technology, wearable technologies have proliferated while linking the areas of art, design, science and engineering. In the art and technology DIY world, the arduino and lilypad platforms and open source software have made these technologies more accessible. Embedded accelerometers within ubiquitous communication and computer hardware such as the i-phone, i-pod touch, and the i-pad among others have simplified the relationship between code and interactivity. Some of the questions to be considered over the course of the next four weeks will include: How do wearable technologies enhance the body’s capabilities to interface with the environment as transmitters, receivers, enablers of data-in-the-world. How do the technologies of material protect the body upon harmful impact (fire, heat, microbes) or enhance more pleasurable sensation? What is the role of risk in relation to the failure of design or delivery? What are the relationships between the practical aspects of use and the aesthetic concerns of design? How do we understand wearable technology in relation to the excesses of commodified culture? While some of our guests will discuss interface design and practice we will also encourage others to theorize about interventions between technology, the body, and architecture. This months guests biographies are below: Week of May 4th Janis Jefferies (UK) is an artist, writer and curator, Professor of Visual Arts at the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, Academic director of the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles and Artistic Director of Centre for Creative and Social Technologies and Goldsmiths Digital Studios. Jefferies was trained as a
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures
That is a very interesting set of provocations and I am delighted to engage this week. Good to connect once again to those I have not touched base with for a while. Drawing on Marshall McLuhans observation 1964 that the garment is an interface to the exterior mediated through digital technology, Seymour 2008 writes that, the electric age ushers us into a world in which we live and breathe and listen through the entire epidermis. She argues that technologies enrich the cognitive characteristics of our human epidermis and stimuli of our senses, whether they are based in biotechnology, digital tech- nology, or nanotechnology or materials like conductive textiles coatings or electronics plastics on the surface of a garment. Fashionable technology be- come amplifiers of fantasy with technically enhanced functionalities. What do fashionable wearables communicate and what is the context of use? How do they amplify ones fantasy? Do they reveal new forms of social interaction? Incorporating RFID or other tracking technologies into clothing (or even implanting it in the body) could be a mixed blessing. On one hand, such technologies might enable different kinds of personal filtering (perhaps singles at a cocktail party might want to access profiles of other available potential partners while moving through a physical space, or bloggers might want to hear a chime as they approach another blogger to compare notes, all sorts of things are possible) but there is an Orwellian flipside to this transparency, as the power of depicting ones identity to the outside world (one historical function of clothing generally) is increasingly given over to a pervasive network. There are several clear divisions in the world of wearable fashion. Fashion shows can suggest that technology is a fetish as much as it is an application. Much of the work shown seemed to be more about the idea of technology rather than about actually using it. Waifish models, in the spirit of androgyny, performed a kind of improvisation of a person who clearly did not fit into the typical gender roles ascribed in society. As androgens in velcro suits, sticking together and twitching around, the sensation of performing is reminiscent of the actress Elsa Lanchester, who played the part of the bride in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The uses of technology in performative textiles or performance in general does not merely add a new tool to an old discipline but rather challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the disciplines themselves. In- deed, digital, networked, virtual and technological performance challenges the very distinction between liveness and media, sensation and cognition, interaction and intra action. These methodologies reactivate the relation- ship between performers and audiences to create new hybrid practices. We can now share the same physical space, a space of becoming, a space of in- teraction and integration with others. We will be able to take the electronic element in our garments for granted whether they generate electricity from our movements, provide gaming opportunities through our sleeves or mon- itor our health. However, we might just keep headphones out of our way as we dance on the street, communicating/collaborating with one another at the same time as calling up our ancestors in a flurry of memory triggered screens, memory ribbons and sampler sounds. Sherry Turkle has been called the Margaret Mead of digital culture in her analysis of how young people navigate the emotional undercurrents in todays technological world [Turkle (2011)]. As an anthropologist, Mead had been trained to think in terms of the interconnection of all aspects of human life so that the production of food cannot be separated from ritual and belief, and politics cannot be separated from childrearing or art. This holistic understanding of human adaptation allowed Mead to speak out on a very wide range of issues, and in particular the relationship between gen- erations [Mead (1978)]. While she wrote of a global culture made possible by mass media, her words actually foresaw fundamental changes made by computer communication networks that were just beginning. Mead believed that in the past culture was transmitted from an older to a younger gen- eration through social rituals and an exploration of what might be shared experience in the process of full attention face to face. Turkle argues that new technologies including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots have broken this tie. The more networked and wired the more seduced and ad- dicted to an autistic world where we expect more from technology and less from each other. Turkle isnt just concerned with the problem of on- line identity, she is disquieted by the banalities of electronic interaction, as a younger generation of Americans range of expression is constrained by gadgets and platforms, a networked
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”
Dear Valerie and Janis, Thank you so much for starting our our discussion this month. After an incredibly long day of teaching my last classes of the semester today I was able to reread both of your posts. There were so many interesting points that you made but I'd like to pick up on something that you both mentioned that resonated with my interests and I'm hoping that you will continue to talk about the following in relationship to your own practical and conceptual work and research. Valerie wrote last night about her interests in three areas but the first was: 1) materiality (what materiality defines a wearable? what are wearables made of? what are the delineating characteristics which define wearables?) Janis wrote this evening: Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s observation 1964 that the garment is an interface to the exterior mediated through digital technology, Seymour 2008 writes that, “ the electric age ushers us into a world in which we live and breathe and listen through the entire epidermis”...snip... Fashion and wearable technology have as their departure point the ability to act as *second skins* interfaces to a world in which we live and breathe and listen through the entire epidermis as Sabine Seymour describes ...snipWearables, as a technology, co-habitate with the body and “perform” stories of amplification. Can you both talk what happens when material and technology merge, ( Sabine will be joining us next week by the way and I know she is traveling this week, but perhaps we can also get her in on this discussion later) particularly when the notion of material becomes literally a second skin, an epidermis that breathes, that joins with the body to augment the body and in turn enable it as mobile architecture (not that of decoration) but of a rebuilding and enhancing of the bodies' capabilities. Any thoughts in relationship to your own work? Renate Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Cornell University Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420 Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@cornell.edu URL: http://www.renateferro.net http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.net Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
