[-empyre-] Wearable Technologies

[Susan Ryan]

Hello everyone--

I am interested in questions about how wearable technologies interface with their cultural contexts.  In that regard,
Sarah's questions about performability and spectacle are interesting.  Don't wearables (in the traditional form of performing dress)
always invoke spectacle, to a greater or lesser degree?  (Of course, the idea of spectacle itself could be queried, are
we just talking about Debord here? Or spectacle in a less or differently politicized sense?)  In public, we are all performers,
as Baudelaire knew (the flaneur was also a dandy).  And performances encourage counter-performances, so audiences may either participate or retreat.
And performances have both insides (the phenomenology of wearing something) and outsides.
How do wearable technologies fit into that history of everyday performativity that fashion itself has written?  

In regards to materiality, Valerie made a good point about situating the technology in wearable technology (I'm also concerned
with situating the wearable in wearable technology).  Dress has always been involved with technology also, and history might
have some answers here.  Note the new book Spacesuit by Nicholas de Monchaux, which demonstrates how Platyex's designers
outperformed the defense engineers in developing the US's first (and symbolically significant as well as functional) astronauts attire.
Performability was the key.

Susan