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

[Melinda Rackham]

hi all,
  nice to see so many colleague so in one discussion and thanks for  
your posts! Hope to catch up with many in Istanbul in September.
I hadnt realized it was so late in the month already and ive been  
wanting to jump in and ask a few questions-- particularly on the  
snippets below..

the concept of the second skin idea is one close to my interests- not  
just as a wearable skin, an augmentation, a spectacle or a projection-  
and danielle, i'd like to hear what more specific terminologies you  
are using to describe these practices..
-  but as a transference/shift/energetic placement/emmanance of the  
self or selves , at once somewhere and elsewhere, be that in material  
architectural public space, virtual electronic public space, emotional  
& sensory space, or the space of vibrational energetic connection.

if the skin is sense organ shifting between internal and external  
spaces, how do wearables transfer sensory information back into the  
bodies they cling to? perhaps the lack up uptake susan refers to  has  
something to do with their functionality of displaying external  
signals rather than facilitate a two way dialogue.. making them  
producers of spectacle rather than transactional devices.. oh and on  
the practical side -bulky batteries.

bio wearables were mentioned early in the discussion but disappeared  
and I am thinking back to Mitchells Whitelaws wonderful book  
MetaCreation: art and artificial life- and the way he  describes the  
coevolution of sensing organs - the receivers and the generators  
needing to be precisely matched to function - the correct codec for  
coding and decoding to appear simultaneously..

i'm imagining a future of wearables that work on electrodermal  
activity, that feed both off and back into the body and the bodies,  
environments and networks around them - and i'm DEFINITELY NOT  
thinking along the lines of the old "father of cybersex" stahl  
stenslie's full-body, tele-tactile communication system -cyberSM of  
1993. We should have come a long way in this area in 20 years -- but  
have we?

warmest flu addled regards,
                     Melinda

Dr Melinda Rackham
Contemporary Artforms Curator
Partner Curator Royal Institution of Australia
Adjunct Professor RMIT University


On 06/05/2011, at 6:39 AM, Janis Jefferies wrote:

> 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  
> at the
> the beginning of this text.


On 07/05/2011, at 8:21 PM, danielle wilde wrote:

> in my own work I have moved away from the use of the term wearables  
> as I feel it has so many connotations that it's difficult to pin  
> down exactly to what it refers, it is therefore very difficult to  
> know if or how frameworks align.

On 11/05/2011, at 7:16 AM, Susan Ryan wrote:

> 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?


and On 18/05/2011,
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 25/05/2011, at 5:11 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote:

> “what emanates from the body and what emanates from the  
> architectural surround intermixes” [Arakawa&Gins],
> but what exactly are these emanations, how do you describe them, in  
> psychological/emotional terms, or in economic terms
> or in terms of social relations that are virtually/tenuously or more  
> deliberately and even profoundly stitched and cross-patched?