[-empyre-] Welcome to Wearable Technologies: Cross-disciplinary Ventures”

Fri May 6 02:25:36 EST 2011

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? 

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> 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.  
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> 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. 
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> 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?
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> 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. 
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> This months guests biographies are below:
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> Week of May 4th
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> 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.
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> Jefferies was trained as a painter and later pioneered the field of
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> contemporary textiles within visual and material culture, internationally
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> through exhibitions and texts. Since 2002 she has been working on
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> technological based arts, including Woven Sound (with Dr. Tim Blackwell).
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> She has been a principal investigator on projects involving new haptics
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> technologies by bringing the sense of touch to the interface between
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> people and machines (MIT)  and generative software systems for creating
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> and interpreting cultural artifacts, museums and the external environment.
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> She is an associate researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and
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> Technologies, subTELA Lab directed by Professor Barbara Layne,
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> Montreal, Canada) on two projects, electronic textiles and new forms of
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> 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.
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> She has had numerous publications but most recently:
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> '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.
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> 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”. 
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> 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.
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> Week of May11th
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> 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.
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> Sabine Seymour (US)  May  9th, 15th -17th
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Week of May 17th
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> Susan Elizabeth Ryan (US)
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> faryan at lsu.edu
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> 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.
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> Week of May 24th
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> 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 
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> 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.
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> 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. 
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> 
> -- 
> 
>> 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/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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Valérie Lamontagne
Technology + Art + Curating
www.valerielamontagne.com

Rotterdam
Gouvernestraat 298, 3014 PX Rotterdam
Netherlands
Mobile: 06-31-279-273

Concordia University
PhD Candidate / Part-Time Faculty
Department of Design + Computation Arts
Faculty of Fine Arts
1515 Ste. Catherine Street West, EV 6.761
Montreal, Quebec H3G 2W1
computationarts.concordia,ca
hexagram.concordia.ca
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