“Hyperdressing” essay published in Design Museum catalog

Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World is the inaugural exhibition of the Design Museum, London, in its new quarters in High Street, Kensington. Curated by Justin McGuirk. Happy to join other authors’s works in this catalog. The exhibition closes April 23, 2017.

design_museum_fear_and_love_int_2

 

 

Advertisement

The Holy Dress

The exhibition Coded Couture at Pratt Institute gallery in New York is a great exploration of what is becoming a bigger field–the thoughtful investigation and interrogation of what “wearable technology” is actually capable of. Melissa Coleman’s mind-blowing Holy Dress (with Joachim Rotteveel and Leoni Smelt) is a dress as a gilded cage that delivers a jolt–literally an electric shock–to its wearer based a process of creating narratives monitored by lie detector technology embedded in the piece. Wow. Pain and pleasure.

IMG_0565

The electrical  charge of this “overdress” creates little light flashes across the dress that my iPhone camera can’t capture. On the mannequin, a programmed array of flashes runs. We have to imagine the shocks.

Meeting Kate Hartman’s Monarch

At the Lively Objects Opening, Museum of Vancouver @ISEA2015

IMG_0520

It was worn by Boris Kourtoukov of the Social Body Lab http://socialbodylab.com

Monarch is a harness with wing-like shoulder enhancements that render the wearer more fearsome. The structures expand and contract in response to sensors on the arm reading muscle movement so they mimic a “fight or flight” posturing.  It is an example of an expressive wearable that addresses human interactions and public display, not just (like so much wearable tech) online communication and consumption.

The True Cost of Fast Fashion–and Fashion Tech?

Video on fast fashion’s human and environmental costs.  If link fails, search            take part.com/true cost.

Screen Shot 2015-06-21 at 9.45.50 AM

http://www.takepart.com/true-cost?cmpid=tpsales-eileenfisher&spMailingID=11930034&spUserID=ODI5NjIwOTQ3NTUS1&spJobID=503994677&spReportId=NTAzOTk0Njc3S0

Environmental concerns: if we add the toxic flows from fast fashion to the ones from all our tech fashion (thrown away devices etc), what does that add up to?

Interview with Diffus Design about Wearable Technology Design Concepts

Diffus Design–Michel Guglielmi and Hanne-Louise Johannsen, is based in Copenhagen. It concerns itself with bringing together technology and traditional crafts.

Interview can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/10033103/Interview_with_Diffus_Design_Michel_Guglielmi_and_Hanne-Louise_Johannsen

Read about their Design Strategies here:

http://www.diffus.dk/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Diffus%20strategies%202013.pdf

Wearable Discourses: Susan Elizabeth Ryan Interviewed by Rebecca Louise Breuer and Geert Lovink

An interview regarding Garments of Paradise will appear in the British journal Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty and is being pre-released on the Institute of Network Cultures and Nettime websites.

See

http://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/11/17/wearable-discourses-interview-with-susan-e-ryan/