May 10 & 11 5pm-9pm
Spring Show 2005
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
For additional
information email
itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
or call 212.998.1880
| Modes for Urban Moods | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Teresa Almeida |  |
| Instructor: | Zurkow, Marina | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/~taa230/spring2005/thesis.html | |
| Documents: | main image(JPEG) | |
| Keywords: | Wearable, inflatable, relational art, everyday life, urban space, utopia, body | |
| A suite of wearables - urban coping mechanisms which explore relationships in public spaces and materialize invisible social networks. | ||
| Being adaptable to daily rhythms can their use circumvent everyday life in the city and be a moment out of its natural order? These tactile, spatial and sculptural expressions fashioned to the body are a rupture in time while resembling animated situations in real space - being bizarre and eccentric representations of situations which critique or identify the existence or absence of conditions and transform meanings, senses, and dynamics through their action. The juxtaposition of the surreal with real life situations negotiate social bounds by animating the unseen and humanizing the technologies we urge to incorporate in our lives. | ||
| Personal Statement: | Dynamic structures fashioned to the body and public space was the relationship I started out with to framework my thesis. How could a mutating wearable accessory reflect one’s experience in urban space/absence of physical space? Could it be an emotional tool, reactive to urban illnesses such as stress or anxiety, modes to communicate moods? If so, how could that be executed, performed?
I’ve been interested in inflatable structures since my undergraduate studies in Theatre Design, where most of my 3D creations were mutating, flexible structures. The magical principle of lightweight materials is very much similar to the one I also discovered in animation, the 2D artistic field that I would explore at the same time, professionally. | |
| Background: | Skins that morph and give life to new shapes and meanings, like the ones experimented by Archigram and more recently by fashion designers like Hussein Chalayan, artists like Alicia Framis or Lucy Orta and designers like Ingrid Hora. The different approaches regarding the creation of borders and orders, the personal and the built (place, city, body) are alternative modes for the understanding of sign systems and technologies of power. They are a critique to the establishment and are the networking of invisible spaces that have been left out of different protocols. It is shown in their work as a social commentary - the search for the ideal, for the utopian models of interaction between beings and their environment. The works are activities, are performable. They are interactive. | |
| Audience: | Modes for Urban Moods is a suite of wearables to be experienced in New York.
The space dress (1 of the suite) is designed for rush hour in the subway and crowded public spaces. It negotiates social bounds, communicates beyond protection/defense and makes visible individuals/members of a community. They are mini-environments, social sculptures, for the experience of one or more people. Everyone involved in the situation is creative input - by means of constraining or not the suit’s space by either being too close or by walking away. More or less passive it is an experience where the observer is turned participant, action meaningful to the statement that “Art is a state of encounter [].” | |
| User Scenario: | Modes are portable spaces | products | artwork and everyone can be a user. They are designed and created for the everyday life while intending to be a “moment of rupture” in individual everyday life. They are catalysts for situations – moments of evasion, disappearance, provocation, seduction– happenings in experimental public spaces with ‘site-specific’ identities – an all responsive space. | |
| Project References, Research and Literature: | www.archigram.net
haus-rücker-co hussein chalayan rei kawakubo Lucy Orta joanna berzowska, the inflatable series michel foucault, Technologies of the self f0.am Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics Jean Baudrillard, The Singular Objects of Architecture Bradley Quinn, The Fashion of Architecture Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International, The theory of moments and the construction of situations; Everyday Life in the Modern World | |