[-empyre-] Welcome to Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”
Renate Ferro
rtf9 at cornell.edu
Thu May 5 11:37:25 EST 2011
Welcome!
May 2011 on –empyre soft-skinned space
“Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
Moderated by *Renate Ferro (US*) and *Tim Murray (US)* with guests:
*Janis Jefferies* (UK), *Valérie Lamontagne* (CA), *Ashley Ferro-Murray*(US),
*Sabine Seymour* (US), *Susan Elizabeth Ryan* (US), *Danielle Wilde*(AU/FR),
*Sarah Kettley (UK), **Lucy Dunne* (*US)*
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 painter and later pioneered the field of
contemporary textiles within visual and material culture, internationally
through exhibitions and texts. Since 2002 she has been working on
technological based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell).
She has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics
technologies by bringing the sense of touch to the interface between
people and machines (MIT) and generative software systems for creating
and interpreting cultural artifacts, museums and the external environment.
She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and
Technologies, subTELA Lab directed by Professor Barbara Layne,
Montreal, Canada) on two projects, electronic textiles and new forms of
media communication in cloth. Wearable Absence was launched in Montreal in
June 2010 and shown as part of the Science Festival in Edinburgh, April
2011.
She has had numerous publications but most recently:
'Loving Attention: An outburst of craft in contemporary art' in
*Extra/ordinary:
Craft Culture and Contemporary Art*, (2011) and ‘One and Another: a
Handshake with the Ancestors’ in *The Shape of Thing* and ‘The Artist as
Researcher in a Computer Mediated Culture’, in *Art Practices in a Digital
Culture*.
*Valérie Lamontagne* (CA) is a digital media designer-artist, theorist and
curator researching techno-artistic frameworks that combine human/nonhuman
agencies. Looking at the rich practice of performance art, social
intervention and interactive installations – she is invested in developing
responsive objects (specifically wearables) and interactive media scenarios
which interlope the public-at-large, the environment and matter as
“performer”.
She is the Founder and Director of 3lectromode, a design group invested in
developing wearables that combine D-I-Y technology with current fashion
research. Her work has been showcased in festivals, galleries and museums
across Canada, the United States, Central and South America and Europe. She
holds an B.F.A. and M.F.A. in visual arts and is presently a Ph.D. candidate
at Concordia University investigating “Performativity, Materiality and
Laboratory Practices in Artistic Wearables” where she teaches in the
Department of Design & Computation Arts.
Week of May11th
*Ashley Ferro-Murray* (US) is a choreographer who uses process-based and
improvisatory movement structures to interrogate emergent technology in
performance and installation. Past works include wearable sensors, digital
animation software, 16mm film technology, and various mechanical apparati.
Without assuming the political potential of technology or the interactive
capabilities of digital media in performance, Ferro-Murray takes both a
historical and experimental approach to building choreographies that
encourage active viewing environments in which media is installed to
instigate subversive energy. Both her artistic and scholarly work revolves
around the histories of and future possibilities for experimental dance,
installation art, and tactical media. Ferro-Murray is a PHD candidate in the
Graduate Program in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in new
media at the University of California, Berkeley.
*Sabine Seymour* (US) May 9th, 15th -17th
Dr. Sabine Seymour focuses on fashionable technology and the intertwining of
aesthetics and function in design and technology. She is described as being
an innovator, visionary, and trend spotter in her work as researcher,
conceptual designer, economist, professor, and entrepreneur. She is the
Chief Creative Officer of her company Moondial, which develops fashionable
wearables and consults on fashionable technology to companies worldwide.
Moondial’s work is based on the convergence of fashion, design, science and
wearable & wireless technologies.
Dr. Seymour is Assistant Professor of Fashionable Technology and the
director of Fashionable Technology Lab at Parsons The New School for Design
in New York and lectures worldwide at numerous institutions. Additionally
Dr. Seymour serves as a jury member for many internationally renowned
institutions and conferences. She recently was the design co-chair for the
ISWC2009 and a jury-member for the Prix Ars Electronica 2009. She frequently
presents and exhibits for instance at Ars Electronica Festival, Cooper
Hewitt National Design Museum, and Smart Textiles. She has received numerous
grants and awards and was awarded the Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart
Design Fellowship in 2010. Dr. Seymour is an editorial review board member
for the International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction and is
widely published. Her recent books ‘Fashionable Technology – The
Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology’ and ‘Functional
Aesthetics – Visions in Fashionable Technology’ have received excellent
reviews.
She received a PhD and MSc in Social and Economic Sciences from the
University of Economics in Vienna and Columbia University in New York and an
MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU’S Tisch School of the Arts in
New York.
Week of May 17th
*Susan Elizabeth Ryan* (US)
faryan at lsu.edu
Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at Louisiana State
University and Fellow of the LSU Center for Computational Technology (CCT).
She teaches contemporary and new media art history and has helped found an
interdisciplinary Art/Engineering undergraduate minor at LSU entitled
AVATAR. Currently she is researching artists' wearable technology. With
Patrick Lichty, she curated *Social Fabrics*, an exhibition sponsored by the
Leonardo Educational Forum, for the College Art Association, Dallas 2008 (
http://www.socialfabrics.org/). She has lectured internationally on dress
and creative technology, and contributed articles to *Leonardo *and the
online journal *Intelligent Agent*.
Week of May 24th
*Danielle Wilde* (AU/FR) thinks, writes, moves and makes to understand how
technology might be paired with the body to poeticise
experience. Her research sits at the nexus of performance, fine art, costume
design, critical (technology) and interaction design. She has a particular
interest in the democratizing value of clumsiness. In 2010 she was visiting
research scholar at Tokyo University's Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory. In 2011
she will complete a PhD titled Swing That Thing: Moving to Move, on the
poetics of embodied interaction. She is currently based in Melbourne, at
Monash University (Fine Art) and CSIRO (Materials Sciences and Engineering).
www.daniellewilde.com
*Sarah Kettley (UK) *is a Senior Lecturer in Product Design at Nottingham
Trent University, and works with product designers and textile artists to
investigate creative processes of engagement with smart materials. She is a
contemporary jeweler with a PhD in Craft as a methodology for the
development of Wearable technology and conducts research in craft and design
theory, embodied interaction, physical computing, and the issues involved in
supporting interdisciplinary creative practice.**
*Lucy Dunne* (*US)* is an Assistant Professor in the department of Design,
Housing and Apparel at the University of Minnesota. She holds B.S. and M.A.
degrees from Cornell University in Apparel Design, and a PhD in Computer
Science from University College Dublin. Her research focuses on wearable
technology and smart clothing, and lies at the intersection of electronic
technology and apparel design. Current areas of focus include navigating the
comfort/accuracy tradeoff in garment-integrated body sensing, novel sensor-
and actuator-based interfaces, new media in fashion design, and wardrobe
management through ubiquitous computing.
--
Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY 14853
Email: <rtf9 at 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/
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