[-empyre-] Wearable Technologies, or dances with horse

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

quite fascinating posts to start off......
and I was not aware (in performance contexts) that there was such a heavy contest going on about
"what materially makes a wearable"?  what new contexts are you referring to where wearables are an issue?
(in terms of how you might like to define it?) - would you agree that in a performance context 
(whether stage or everyday life although I tend to think the latter is different from the former)
the wearables are what you wear for a particular purpose?  Are the wearables here meant to
be associated with technologies (have function other than being worn?) or purposes, and if they are second
skins, then we don't have to worry, yes?

Then they are us. 



Can I ask Janis,  whether you were referring to a particular fashion show?

>>
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
>>

hmm.  they were wearing unused wearables?


as to the question of the skins, I think one example that came to attention (in the bio-art / new media art scene)
was Symbiotica (with Oron Catts) trying to "grow" a wearable except that it probably was'nt going to be large enough
for Lady Gaga, and perhaps was not intended as a costume or second skin anyway. As you know, The Tissue Culture
Project has created some fascinating installations  exploring the potential –as well as the problems –  involved in tissue engineering. 

Perhaps this is what Valerie is hinting at, that growing / or medically inserting your third and fourth ears on your arms or legs (with network capabilities and memory)
may indeed alter operational possibilities or anatomical architectures,  and further complex enhancements may limit what you can do on the stage or the team...

Now, Symbiotica's "Victimless Leather" (2004), was a miniature leather jacket that lives inside a bioreactor. The work, I was told, was a reaction to using animal skins to make clothing/wearables. 
Tissue engineering may offer an alternative indeed, yet the artists grafted cells from a living animal  – a mouse –  onto a polymers structure of in the shape of a jacket.  The idea was that the cells will stay alive,
multiply in a protected environment.  I take it the work is ironic,  as the “semi-living” being thus created could not really be worn, but it raises issues as a fetish object anyway.  And about protective environments.
And what did the project perform?

Janis argues (or uses Barad) that "science performs" or that " science, as a knowledge-based
endeavour, is inherently “performative” ...  hmmm, what is it that is performed?  The term performativity 
tends to be used these days quite a lot and I often wonder how it is used, for what end and in regard to what situation.
Would you really use such a grammar if you referred to a dancer (the dance dances) or an acrobat performing a particular action
for a particular end, in a theatre or a circus,  and would it be at all meaningful to say that wearables perform or are performative?
In the Cirque de Soleil, the wearables don't perform.  (and at London's Sadlers' Wells recently, Bartabas and Ko Murobushi performed with horses,
or the other way round,  the horses wore out the dancers).

I'd ask more specifically what it is that is performed, what is augmented and what is (as you imply in your reference to social autism, Janis) reduced and shrunk.


with regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap