August 01, 2005
August on -empyre- soft-skinned space:
Wearable Technologies
This month on -empyre-, we venture into the world of wearable technologies in the context of social and public art practice. Katherine Moriwaki (US) is an artist and researcher investigating clothing accessories as the active conduit through which people create network relationships in public space. Florian 'Floyd' Mueller (AU) designs interfaces that deliberately require intense physical effort to facilitate social connectedness between remote participants. Heidi Kumao's (US) incisive feminist practice currently investigates the RFID tags that industry is adopting for product tracking, the government for border control and public libraries for automatic checkout.
Katherine Moriwaki is an artist and researcher investigating clothing and accessories as the active conduit through which people create network relationships in public space. After receiving her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Katherine co-developed and taught the ground-breaking collaboration studio "Fashionable Technology" at Parsons School of Design. Currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin, her work has appeared in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, and numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou (02), Break 2.2 (03), Ubicomp (03,04), eculture fair (03), Transmediale (04), CHI (04), ISEA (04), Ars Electronica (04), Wired NextFest (05), and Siggraph (05). She is a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO.
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller is a Principal Scientist in the ICT Centre, leading the "Connecting People" group at CSIRO - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia. His research interests are in novel interfaces that help people to connect, to media as well as to other people, creating a more seamless connection between humans and technology. He proposed the concept of Exertion Interfaces: interfaces that deliberately require intense physical effort to facilitate social connectedness between remote participants at
Heidi Kumao is an artist who dissects ordinary social interactions using new media and animation, kinetic/electronic sculpture, and performance art. Her work takes the form of intimate robotic/kinetic installations, single channel videos and animations, and wearable electronics. She uses technology to address feminist issues and insert a femal point of view into the world of high-tech innovation. "WiredWear" consists of the research, design, and creation of one-of-a-kind articles of women's clothing equipped with custom electronics and an accompanying informational video. Each article enhances the wearer's everyday life by transforming the smallest social interaction or relationship into a performative exchange or by providing the wearer with important vital information (words of encouragement, bio feedback, etc.). Kumao also works collaboratively with Preemptive Media, a group of artists, activists, and technologists to create projects around emerging technologies and their corresponding policies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Their most recent project, Zapped!, investigates the RFID tags that industry is adopting for product tracking, the government for border control and public libraries for automatic checkout.
Posted by jo at August 1, 2005 07:08 AM
