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

[Renate Ferro]

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 ...snip....Wearables, 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:   <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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