PERSONALDEBRIS  

a couple of years ago i wrote an article titled “The Future of Wearables” for Rhizome. in my article i profiled designer Elise Co and her fantastic work. from a very early start elise has been ahead of the curve, working on challenging ideas which remain relevant in this quickly moving area. (previous blog posts mentioning elise can be found here.)

one of her projects, Perforation (1999) struck me as especially poetic and beautiful. challenging the physicality of the body “through transparency”, a mass of fiber optic cables transfer light from one side of the body to the other.

Elise Co’s “Perforation”

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a quick roundup of related weaving and electronics projects. thoughts will come later, but for now just the links:

“Fault Lines” by Barbara Layne and Ingrid Bachmann

update: the photo i have of Barbara’s textile is really bad quality. to see some better images and the actual textile in action, view the short .avi of Barbara talking about the piece (3.96mb) at ISEA 2004. (thanks Jonah!)

Barbara Layne, a professor at Concordia University in Montr�al is working on weaving electronic components directly into fabrics. She and her graduate students have constructed a wearable LED matrix that can be programmed to display text or patterns. (Unfortunately I don’t have the images of this project with me and they aren’t on her site, so I’ll have to update with a photo.) One of her previous works (with Ingrid Bachmann) titled “Fault Lines” swaps real-time seismic data from California and Canada, with a weaver in each location inscribing the patterns into a textile. (more…)

we’ve posted pictures from the DIY wearable challenge. we did two of these workshops. one for the estonian academy of arts on august 14th and one for ISEA 2004 on august 18th. both were awesome! - see for yourself: DIY Wearable Challenge I and DIY Wearable Challenge II.

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some photos of INSIDE/OUTSIDE on exhibition at ISEA 2004 at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.

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The current BYOB prototype from MIT

those wacky kids at MIT have built a reconfigurable handbag called BYOB - no, not Bring Your Own Booze as the acronym is commonly known, but BYOB as in “Build Your Own Bag.” the idea is really quite brilliant - with small squares which can be reconfigured and assembled as each person sees fit, the BYOB creators see the project as “a flexible, computational-enhanced modular textile system.”

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some photos of of RECOIL at the ISEA 2004 fashion show in Tallinn:

the dancers who modelled the garments were fantastic. i was so impressed with their improvisational skills and with their ability to really make the garments come alive. my only regret was that the stage didn’t have more metal! - backstage the dancers were doing amazing work with the exposed pipes and metal doors of the kitchen-turned-dressing-room in the back of the club. i wasn’t taking any video, but i saw a few people with video cameras and i know the ISEA staff were documenting. i’ll have to get a copy so i can post…

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part II of horizon zero’s issue 16 : WEAR is out! my article, Between the Skin and the Garden: New Modes of Interaction in the Wearable Data Environment is online, as well as Anne Galloway’s interview with Maggie Orth of International Fashion Machines.

a couple years ago i worked on two projects started in October 2002, Inside/Outside, and Urban Chameleon, both of which were presented in 2003 at different venues. (Inside/Outside at Ubicomp 2003, e-culture fair 2003, FEED 2004, and ISEA 2004 - Urban Chameleon at the Digital Hub 2003) The projects look at personally invested urban environmental monitoring.

Inside/Outside bags by Katherine Moriwaki - the bag on the left monitors air quality. the bag on the right monitors environmental noise.

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some more touch and hug related wearables:

UPDATE: an image of Joey\’s intimate memory skirt - she showed this at Banff. the documentation for this project can be found at the XS Labs website.

at Banff, Joey Berzowska showed a skirt that illuminated small embedded LEDs when certain panels were groped. the LEDs fade in relation to how long the panel was touched, representing a history of how often recently a person was groped.

and here at ISEA, Kelly Dobson exhibited a garment which inflates when “hugged” through actual physical contact or via mobile phone.

both projects have some commonalities with other projects i’ve blogged here before, such as alison lewis‘ closer, and francesca rosella and rikako sakai’s F+R hugs, and despina’s hug jackets.

hotspot bloom by karen lee

at spectropolis in new york city karen lee is showing hotspot bloom a wearable wifi detector. this sort of reminds me of wifi sense, by milena iossifova (UPDATE: and ahmi wolf) which was part of the demo program of ubicomp 2003. both projects display the presence of wifi nodes as a wearable, light illuminated accessory.

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