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

[Janis Jefferies]

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 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”. 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 one’s 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 one’s 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 isn’t 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 life of
loneliness and failed solitude.

This implies an even greater separation between generations and cultures
than ever before.Indeed culture clashes are alive and living well in the
hands of Embroi- derers guilds and YouTube. What we need to think through
are the ideas proposed by Lucy Suchman 2007 in which situated interaction
is character- ized as “lively, moment-by-moment assessment of the
significance of partic- ular circumstances” (op. cit., p176) through the
electronics of our clothing and in the sensation of our performative
gestures. In her terms, interac- tion is a name for ongoing, contingent co
production of the socio material world, an engaged participation that
cannot be stipulated in advance. For feminist scholar Karen Barad’s
quantum physics-inspired posthumanism re- deems the concept of
performativity from a techno-scientific standpoint to argue that science
“performs” – in experiments, in laboratories, with spe- cialised
instruments, with human agents etc. Science, as a knowledge-based
endeavour, is inherently “performative” for Barad [2003]. She notes that
“the move towards performative alternatives to representationalism shifts
the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and the
move towards performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the
fo- cus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality
(e.g., do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of
practices/doings/actions” (op. cit., p802-803).
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 at the
the beginning of this text.

Wearables, as a technology, co-habitate with the body and “perform”
stories of amplification. These are stories of science fiction and fantasy
and are beginning to be played out in new and unexpected ways. The “Look
at me, I’m electric!” appeal of wearable tech- nology has entered
celebrity status with Lady Gaga performing in a living, kinetic dress with
moving parts. She is almost transformed into the ‘Bride of Frankenstein’
herself.

Here's my references

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of
how matter comes to matter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28, 3, pp. 801–831.
Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and
socialist- feminism in the late twentieth century, in Simians, Cyborgs and
Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge), pp. 149–181.
Harris, S. (2008). Catwalk goes techno, Engineering and Technology Magazine,
http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2008/18/catwalk-goes-techno-0818.cfm.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Verso Press).
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-
Hill, New York).
Mead, M. (1978). Culture and Commitment: The New Relationships Between the
Generations in the 1970s (Anchor Books/Doubleday).
Seymour, S. (2008). Fashioning Technology (Springer).
Suchman, L. (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Ac-
tions (Cambridge University Press).
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and
Less from Each Other (Basic Books).


Janis




On Thu, May 5, 2011 5:25 pm, Valerie Lamontagne wrote:
> 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 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/
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
> .............................................
> 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
> .............................................
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre