[-empyre-] Wearable Technologies

[Ashley Ferro-Murray]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Danielle and Johannes for continuing the thread on
audience/performer. Indeed, an old debate. Still, one that increasingly
weighs on decisions regarding the rehearsal process and performance practice
as they relate to wearables and various performance technologies. I am
particularly interested in the connection between wearables and
installation. I think that this will be an interesting avenue for dance and
dancers.

Often, I think that a lot of the choreographic decisions rely on concepts of
"performance" and performability as Susan introduces the idea. Nicholas de
Monchaux works with me here at the Berkeley Center for New Media. I do think
that this discussion of the spacesuit is interesting in that it has to do
with the performability of movement as it relates to social and political
production of wearables. This brings us back to the potential for wearables
to incite everyday performance. On the one hand, the spacesuit is the
epitome of everyday culture and popular culture and strives to make possible
everyday bodily performance.

In both the case of performance and installation art and the case of popular
culture icons such as the spacesuit, it seems that the performability of
wearables relies on a fixed notion of the body and movement. Or does
it? Perhaps bringing in a disability perspective is key here. How do the
design and implementation of wearables assume a normative and abled body?

Ashley





On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Susan Ryan <faryan at lsu.edu> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Ashley Ferro-Murray
PhD Student
Dept. Theater, Dance & Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley
ferromurray.net
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