[-empyre-] Thoughts on Dress

Wed May 18 09:57:51 EST 2011

Hello again everyone.  The discussion about performance practices, and the exploration of internal augmentation as a way to better understand the body, has been enlightening. I was especially interested in Michele’s comments about Antonio Damasio’s research, and how he considers not only the internal feedback mechanisms within the body, but also the new light this sheds on how organisms interact with their surroundings.  

On that note I would  like to reintroduce the subject of wearable technology and the social dimension. I suggest that this is actually something that, rather than being an obvious or simplistic question of spectacle, is actually an area that is not well enough understood or discussed. 

We might not dismiss fashion so quickly either, as it accounts for a large portion of work in wearable technology. Fashion—or as practices of dress as I would rather think of it—is a pervasive and complex subject that cannot be spanned by concepts of design, trends, consumerism and fantasy. The world of fashion is a commercial one, or, rather, one in which commerce and aesthetics proceeds in strange but fascinating dialog (true also of art). Yet, this dialog is driven by the input of heterogeneous populations: ideas from streetwear and youth trends, for example. A range of political, economic, and social factors are also at work in dress behavior as Gilnles Lipovetsky has shown (The Empire of Fashion).  Is it a realm of ideas in which many different people, at different levels of discourse, participate? I think so. Witness the recent DIY practices of making clothing out of commercial products like candy wrappers, and the duct-tape prom garments in the news of late. Simple and understandable conversations take place via dress as well as sophisticated and erudite ones. I like to think that the term “dress” creates a broader foundation that might include fashion (and anti-fashion and the deconstruction of the institution of fashion) as well as many other phenomena related to what we wear and how we use garments to navigate a public domain and communicate a lot more than just our personalities. Dress may be one of the few creative things we all do on a daily basis, although its level of creativity is sometimes overlooked. Moreover, the idea of expressing ourselves through dress has changed as a result of the impact of virtual self-constructions and the spectacles of social media.

Smart textiles and wearable technologies has always been driven, like all technologies, by applications and functionality. Even the recent interest in wearables and emotion are usually driven by the desire to effectively index or control some aspect of the human body (this may not be true in performative arts like dance, but on a larger scale of research, it is). Since technology enhances control, I am concerned about how such research positions itself as to who (or what) is in control, and who is under control.

Also I find fascinating that after several decades of wearable technology exploration (since the 1980s or so), so little of it has entered the general social field. Cute Circuit dresses Katie Perry in LEDs, and Lady Gaga revives Leigh Bowery via some technological ideas (although simple illumination, the most spectacular and banal, reigns—see Janis’s comments about the “look at me, I’m electric” level of discourse!). Chalayan has experimented with various technologies and dress for decades. Philips Technology has created dozens of prototypes for illuminated garments and clothes that sense their wearers.  But despite the celebrities and huge market interest and strides that have been made in smart textiles, there is still little interest on the part of a significant public in exploring wearable technology in the way they actually dress. I wonder about this. Why is wearable technology such an exclusive field? Perhaps most people have chosen to simply carry a single node—their mobile phone/personality central. When we are using our phones, I wonder, do we think we are invisible?

 But even in our culture of devices, Susan Kozel has noted that a lot of information can be understood by considering the mobile phone, even though it is not a true “wearable” in most cases (or is it?): “Do people hunch into it or speak loudly as an indication of social or financial status, hide it inlayers of clothes or expose it, place it on their desks beside them or dig in the bottom of their bags for it? Is it set to ring loudly or softly . . . ?” (Closer: Performance Technologies and Phenomenology, 274.)

 A number of artists are using wearables to address ideas about communication in a social media simulacrum.  Examples include Ebru Kurbak and Ricardo Nascimento’s Taiknam Hat, which mimics animal behavior to visualize EMF waves; and Nascimeno and Tiago Martins’ Rambler athletic shoes that upload footsteps to Twitter (http://www.popkalab.com/ ). A young designer, Tesia Kosmalski, has developed a coat with speaker/shoulder pads that amplifies and enhances the sound of the wearer’s footsteps, mixing them with the staccato sound of heels clicking on hard floor, gendered sound that amplifies the stature and movement of the wearer in a public place (the coat incorporates simple technologies like miniature speakers, amplifiers, and ipods; http://tesiakosmalski.com/home.html ).

 But I often wonder why I don’t see more. Perhaps I am perceiving more promise in this field than it actually holds. I also wonder if the general lack of adventurousness in wearable technology means we are still just reticent to grant the status of complex discourse to dress.

On May 16, 2011, at 10:28 PM, Renate Ferro wrote:

> Welcome to Week 3 of our discussion on Wearable Technologies:  Cross-disciplinary Venures. 
> 
> I'd like to welcome Susan Elizabeth Ryan to our discussion this week.  I'm hoping that our guests from weeks 1 and 2 will continue to write in as our discussion continues.  Best Wishes to all of you who are ending your semester!  Renate 
> 
> 
> 
> Welcome to Susan Elizabeth Ryan (US)
> 
> 
> 
> Biography: 
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
>> 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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