August 21, 2004
tell it all
Computer couture is all the rage these days. HorizonZero’s July issue focuses on "smart clothes" and "fashionable technologies." Banff’s Sara Diamond and Joanna Berzowska, Assistant Professor of Design and Digital Image/Sound at Concordia University, Canada, whose "Intimate Electronics" can be found in HorizonZero’s July issue are both at ISEA. We’re bound to hear more and more about the latest developments in this long history of prostheses, which probably had its beginning with efforts to improve eyesight. (Roger Bacon made the first recorded reference to lenses for optical purposes in 1268; in 1665, Robert Hooke called for inventions to improve our other senses. See A brief history of wearable computing. And we’ve been at it ever since.
But now it’s not the eyes but a pair of jackets that broadcast and respond to "their other half" by wireless signals. Yes, and make sounds like crickets mating when they find one another! Or, reactive garments that display their history of use. There’s high drama embedded in this stuff!
But also serious concerns.
While the recent exhibition DIS2004 in Cambridge, MA (USA), was not focused on clothing, it contained one wearable item in which concern was expressed for the overall impact of mobile communication: Fashion Victims by Italian artists Davide Agnelli, Dario Buzzini and Tal Drori. Mobile communication devices bring with them "a number of social consequences, most of which are still invisible, hard to map and to explain." In Fashion Victims the artists designed a collection of garments that react to surrounding mobile phone calls in order to make a part of the invisible visible. As more phone calls are conducted in their surroundings, the clothes "progressively and permanently change color." By producing a physical result they call attention to the "pervasiveness and intrusiveness" of the mobile phone – its tendency to "violate the private space we potentially have within the public context."
Another wearable, WiFisense (currently, a handbag with 64 LEDs embedded in the front) does something similar--it detects open wireless networks and uses patterns of light and sound to announce their availability, quality and accessibility.
Still, it seems far less likely to this blogger that cautionary clothing will find commercial support than clothing that extends the private into the public. It's the direction we Americans have opted for since radio and television first caught the public imagination.
And when in 2001 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency jump-started a project to accelerate the development of electronic textiles, one of its beneficiaries was MIT Media Lab graduate Maggie Orth, co-founder of International Fashion Machines (IFM) and someone taking clothing in that direction.
IFM’s proprietary electronic textiles include Electric Plaid, (color change textile technology) and StitchSwitch, (textile sensing technology). Combine them and you can create fully interactive textiles and artworks. Which means, among other things, you can change the color of your clothing or the interior of your house to match your mood. Read more
So I’d count on clothing that tells more and more about you. With your clothes giving you away, pretending may be hard .
Why we should be interested in this – and I think we should – will be the subject of another blog. And I'm hoping we can get some discussion going on it.
Posted by newradio at August 21, 2004 12:35 PM
