[-empyre-] the Friendship Jewellery
Susan Ryan
faryan at lsu.edu
Mon May 30 00:54:36 EST 2011
Thanks Sarah!
When I wondered about wearable technology as either instrumentalist or elitist I was concerned about the existence of vibrant, evolving practices. In this sense, Sarah’s concerns about distribution are central because if we are talking about practices that affect or involve only individuals or occasional small groups of specialists, we are not talking about cultural phenomena.
I believe that any application involving the body must take into consideration human behavior in the networks within which we live. Dress (and again I prefer the term over fashion, in order to move beyond the simple disposition many of us have against the evils of commercialization) has always created networks and does so today. Dress ideas travel and branch out; they are rhizomatic. They form networks (open and closed) based on both feeling and display, combined. There are social constraints and commercial power-grabs (market forces), but power nodes are usually contested and in flux. This is a living, breathing part of how we exist as humans who must cover our bodies most of the time. Sarah's friendship group demonstrated how good her wearers were at navigating the ideas of dress/identity/contact.
> The pieces themselves were deliberately ambiguous in terms of both their place in the women’s world, but my initial dichotomous questions of device or decoration? technology or craft? turned out to be very naïve, as the women themselves were very quickly able to negotiate sophisticated hybrids of these not only as static meanings, but as fluid configurations dependent on their activities and interactions.
Sarah’s necklaces, which I had the pleasure of showing in action in exhibition some years ago, provide a way to look at this kind networking in a specific way (see http://www.ankeloh.net/pdf/leonardo_0409.pdf scroll to p. 4, see Eddie Shanken wearing on of Sarah’s necklaces--there were several other people forming a closed network in the space). Jewelry functions as a part of dress, and in this case rather differently than a hand-held device.
Against dress is the opposing reality of networks in which we select a symbolic appearance or dissimulate within a screen, avatar, text message, or (ugh!) commercially produced social media site which allows us to disappear” and reappear in some preferred, or less risky, version of ourselves. Thanks, Janis, for bringing up Sherry Turkle’s latest book (early on in this discussion) as I have been reading it since you did. How do we account for the amazing popularity of those systems? Have they changed our very way of seeing ourselves and each other in social relations? (Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, 2006,161, says that the "subject centered body has been left behind insofar as the digital image has corporealized itself"--our body threatens to be media).
What is the accomplishment of wearable technology in a screen based age? Our dress is less often technologically enhanced (in meaningful ways), our wearable technology less vibrant as a general behavior, than I would like to see—than I think we might aspire to.
I also hope to find some of you at the (recently controversial!) ISEA Istanbul!
On May 29, 2011, at 6:27 AM, Kettley, Sarah wrote:
>
> Sure Renate, thanks for your questions -
>
> The Friendship Jewellery was a closed network (for technical reasons at the time), although the platform it used, Speckled Computing, is intended to be open and entirely peer-to-peer, the enabling technology of Ubiquitous Computing (see www.specknet.org). There were five neckpieces in this collection, using RSSI to ‘see’ each other; once selected and worn by the five women, the colour coded identities of the pieces effectively became the identities of the individuals, with references to them in conversation and reflection consistently intermingled. The pieces themselves were deliberately ambiguous in terms of both their place in the women’s world, but my initial dichotomous questions of device or decoration? technology or craft? turned out to be very naïve, as the women themselves were very quickly able to negotiate sophisticated hybrids of these not only as static meanings, but as fluid configurations dependent on their activities and interactions.
>
> The basic functionality of each node in the network is to identify other nearby nodes (within a range of approximately 20m in this case). The only information displayed is the identity of the other nodes found and whether they are distant (over 1m away), social (30cm – 1m away) or intimate (closer than 30cm). These distances had been arrived at through a combination of drama exercises and reflection on greeting rituals, but were found to correlate closely with Hall’s theory of proxemics (1966). While identity and distance were reflected in the LED output of the pendants, direction was not – playing on concepts of seamfulness and the creativity of the wearer in wearable systems, this piece of information was deliberately left out so that the women would have to work with the environment to deduce the information upon which they would base social actions (approach or avoid?). By this I mean the interruptions and opportunities that certain building materials and architectural arrangements provide for connectivity and awareness of others in a space (we used the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, UK to work through two games).
>
> Gender wasn’t an explicit topic of the work to begin with, rather I was interested in how a self professed friendship group could be seen as a distributed user. But, as they were all women of retirement age, (and to be fair, working with jewellery meant this was easier), certain questions did arise connected with how at that time (2004-2006), HCI still hadn’t managed to think much beyond the ideal individual fully functioning male body, as has been mentioned already in this discussion. Even the age group was a challenge for HCI, as until recently, there has been a tendency to treat ‘the elderly’ as a homogeneous group of over 60’s. This friendship group also demonstrated that marketing based on demographics is a hopelessly narrow approach, and that at certain life stages, we do not all choose to dress the same, or view the world in the same way, but that this does not diminish the power of our relationships, and our ability to express a collective belonging when in public spaces.
>
> This is an incredibly important lifestage to be designing for. The women were dealing with the loss of close relatives, family politics, the care of those close to them, and other friendships dispersed across the world. Some of them held high powered jobs, some of them are artists. One of them had just published her own PhD thesis. Working with them was both a privilege and a pleasure, and very humbling. One of them was buried last week.
>
> A full account of the project can be found in my thesis, Crafting the Wearable Computer, as well as papers documenting particular aspects of it, on my research webpage at http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/research_sarah_kettley_.html.
>
> Obviously there were many directions this work could have gone in. I pursued the theatricality of jewellery and shifted from the everyday to the gallery space, still working with the networked platform, and exploring sound (the ensemble project). See web pages for both projects at http://www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk/sarahkettley/wearables_and_tangible_interfaces_sarah_kettley_.html.
>
> Sarah
>
>
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