[-empyre-] [empyre] wearable technology

[Ana Valdés]

I worked for a while at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm,
https://www.tii.se/projects
at that time we carried very advanced experiments using inbedded chips in
clothes weared by surgeons and firefighters. The uses of the inbedded chips
was to identify people in a dangerous environment (a fire, a smoked
warehouse, a hospital, etc.)
Ana


On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Sarah Hamilton <sjlhamilton at gmail.com>wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi everyone,
>
> The idea of technologically embedded clothes is one that I think
> intersects with so many of our discourses. For instance, clothing can be a
> real life actualization of memetic thought -- a quick survey of a group of
> people (students in a class, people walking down the street, commuters on a
> train) will show that most people wear roughly the same thing as each other.
>
> With that in mind, I consider the relatively new consumer trend of
> monitoring bracelets, either Nike, Jawbone or Fitbit. For those who are
> unfamiliar with it, these are rubber bracelets that cost between $99-150
> US, and monitor your heart rate and sleep patterns, among other things. The
> impetus for these products is health related, as oppose to fashion related.
>
> There's also been discussion of these products being used by primary
> physicians to monitor the health of their patients.
>
> At this point, clothing moves away from the aesthetic or convenient, and
> towards health implications. When technology starts measuring our choices
> in real time, how does that affect those decisions?
>
> Sarah Hamilton
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Susan E Ryan <faryan at lsu.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>  Hello all,
>>
>>  I have been researching wearable technology, for the past several
>> years, from the standpoint of dress.  In my book to come out in June, *Garments
>> of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age *I argue that dress
>> has always been a "technology" and advances historically as a particular
>> type of technology, one subject to the social, expressive, and corporeal
>> constraints of dress in any given period. At the same time, wearable
>> technology (today) is subject to the regimes and mythologies of technology,
>> such as the illusion of perfectibility (thus my title, loosely from Giorgio
>> Agamben, who writes about dress in the Christian tradition: aspiring to the
>> condition of the gauzy garments of light that Genesis suggests we wore
>> before the Fall). Technology perfects us? Or that's what we aspire to?
>>
>>  I am interested in artists, like Joey Berzowska and Anouk Wipprecht and
>> many, many others, who utilize the genre of dress as a means to broach some
>> of the problems of becoming digitized
>> in this way, discovering the imperfections in our quest for perfection.
>>
>>  Dress is different from being injected with technology, implantation,
>> or any cyborgian merging, because dress is continuously dynamic in terms of
>> form and type and its process involves the wearer, a material substrate,
>> and whatever industries s/he draws garment/technologies from. It represents
>> day-by-day choices and experiences and opportunities, as well as the
>> ability to misuse, misappropriate--dress that uses technology in a deviant
>> way.
>>
>>  So I find Katja's ideas about interaction to be especially interesting,
>> because the phenomenon of wearing or dressing is constantly interactive on
>> multiple levels, so that adding digital media to the mix (like the Glass)
>> raises specific questions for how we exist, perform, and move about the
>> world, and how the world mirrors us.
>>
>>  It's late and I'm just throwing a few things out to get this part of
>> the discussion started.
>>
>>  Susan Elizabeth Ryan
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
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