addie and lots of coffee.

the last time my life got thrown up in the air and I got to watch it fall all to the ground was when I moved to New York.

I sold it all, I left everything I swear I'd never leave and started all over again in a place I had many more bad memories then good.

I got here, I settled- it took months, but I did, I found a place I could be happy. I started to replace all those bad memories with good. I committed my life to this place as much as you can commit to a place and now I see things in the horizon and I'm beginning to fear the whole process might have to start over all over again. You know, I hate planning, I hate hate hate asking questions of people when I'm not sure they really know the answers; or maybe I'm afraid of their answers..

The last two or so years I've started to feel a shift, the moving every 6 months like I've done every 6 months since I was 16 isn't so glamorous anymore, I find myself craving a sense of home and I find myself craving a partner to share it all, I find my definitions shifting in ways I never could of anticipated.

Something has changed in my fearless emotionless life, and I'm finding I crave meaning so I can find purpose.

I keep trying to let go, blah blah live in the moment blah blah, repeating to myself something ryan said to me months ago, 'someday...its going to work out...and all the bad experiences will be meaningless'

Posted by itp at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've been rethinking the content of my wearables final and the physical composition of it. Sunday night I had a sort of spring cleaning of my apartment, I basically cleaned out everything and every space of my apartment, I recycled the boxes that have been in the corner for months, went through all my clothes and then I had an idea.

With all this thinking about sustainable why not utilizes my perfectly good garments for my wearables supplies? I started to collect all the black items and put them in a pile, sure enough I have plenty. Tonight I organized them all and began cutting up what I could use from each item, in just about an hour I had a good pile of fabric to create my jacket/wrap with, I'm going to recreate one out my favorite items I wear out of my old clothing (see here and click on 'how to wear' to get an idea of ways the user can use the item)'

I still will be utilizing the 6 channel audio embeded into the garmet but content will be shifted drastically to include;

'thing you should know':
credit card
passwords
secrets
boyfriends
lies

I plan on recording vocal tracks which list my credit card numbers, logins/passwords, secrets, lies and thoughts about relationships.

The dialouge will be much more about what it is to be 'in my skin' then it will be a universal dialouge about other peoples experiences

Posted by itp at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yesterday was so beautiful out, hatti and I took a trip outside the floor for some macro shooting for digital imaging homework around NYU right before the sun went down...

Posted by itp at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we'll we've been working on bikejuice a lot. Yesterday I managed to blow the invertor, so Marc has another one ordered and on its way. Today we worked on getting the light to work again, moved down to a LED. We are considering doing a LED interface to chart the amount of energy a user generates like the carnival strength game, this was sort of Todds idea but then we really ran with it and have been trying to figrue out where to buy 1w LEDs for less then 4.60 a piece.

Posted by itp at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ever catch a glimpse into someone else's life and mourn for something you've never had?

Posted by itp at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

its officially spring, I slept with the windows open last night, awoke to look out my window at a bird with a mouth full of nesting supplies and I'm about to go on a bike ride with nothing but spring weight riding gear on.

climbing, cycling, running, kayaking, hiking season is almost here, I can feel it.

Posted by itp at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

arms of jacket have been cut open to allow for wrapping of the user wearing the jacket (hopefully to appear as if the user is giving themself a hug) although user can wear arms in different ways to allow for switches to be turned on.

speakers are placed inside hoodie as well as inside the sleeves or arms. when wrapped around user neck, user hears all 4 audio channels clearly..

when wrapped around wasit, user hears 2 audio channels and outsiders or passerbyes here 2 audio channels or when arms worn on the back user and passerbyes will hear audio channels at different levels.

arm speaker detail

hood speaker detail

I also utilized different types of audio speakers in order to achieve different effects and volume levels

detail of interior (which would be lined and covered in final as well as include zigbee or switch technologies)

Posted by itp at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As humans are most naked vulnerabilities are often exposed when we are ill.

Today there was nothing I wanted more then my mom, or at least someone who can pretend to take care of me.

I remember the first time I got really sick away from home, ironically it was in New York, I think I was 16 maybe just 17, I got some sort of UTI and I thought the world was going to collapse on me, it was one of those pinnacle moments I felt like an adult because no one was there to coddle me anymore, I remember so clearly feeling alone and grown up.
I remember taking myself to the hospital in the taxi and explaining to them how I thought I was going to die from the pain. I couldn't stand up straight. I remember getting a shot of antibiotics and not having any ones hand to hold. The nurse must of known I was scared, he put his hand out for me and I squeezed for dear life.

I remember last summer when I was in France, it was just a day or two before the tour was coming through Alpe d'Huez, I had been out on my bike all day and just got back in time to cook some pasta when my mom called to tell me she had cancer and was going into her second surgery the next day. I remember the same sensation then, feeling alone and trying to cry so quietly that no one would see or hear that anything was wrong.

I remember the terrible feeling I had of guilt, I remember starting the what ifs, I remember when she said the C word I automatically thought about every other person I've loved and lost that year. I started to think about how badly my mom wanted grandchildren and that even if I tried she would maybe never get to see them if things got worse. I remember feeling helpless there as much as I did when I was in that ER room ten years ago. Is this what being an adult means, feeling vulnerability yet going forward anyway?

I have always had some theory about illness in nature, there are humans who are 'public bleeders' and there are the ones who hide the problems so well you'd never know anything was wrong. Birds do that too, that's why they die so quickly sometimes, they try to hide weakness and illness from their flock and by the time you notice something is wrong, they're gone. I always wonder if that's where I get my ideas about survival, from the birds. I guess it somehow makes sense in a logical manner.

Never say you're not ok.
Never say you need help.
Never show you're weak.

And the irony in all of that is that I have realized that the ones who ask for love or help the least often are often the ones who need it the most.

How do you begin to ask for what you need when you've spent you're whole life hiding?

Posted by itp at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

at what point does a fever cause brain damage?

Posted by itp at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Buddhists believe that before they begin the life-changing work of their Zen practice, the world is exactly how it appears. Mountains are mountains, they are famous for saying, and rivers are rivers.

Once they start to meditate, though, to lose themselves in the change that must occur, mountains cease to be mountains and rivers cease to be rivers. The Zen student loses the points of reference he has always relied upon; mountains overlap and dissolve into rivers, rivers break their barriers and rise up like mountains, and the student becomes less and less sure about who and what he is, dissolving his sense of self within a dissolving world.

With enough understanding and practice, things click back into place; mountains go back to being mountains and rivers go back to being rivers. But meditation has moved the student to a place where he can see that the mountains exist in relationship to the rivers and that they make each other possible. He has opened his eyes to the interrelatedness of everything, including the world and himself.

In the last few years, all my mountains became rivers and all my rivers became mountains. In the most literal sense, I found myself negotiating rivers when they fell down rapids as steep as the sides of mountains, and I learned that rather than climbing to the top of mountains, I preferred to walk around them, to encircle them, the way a river would. I also lost every reference point that had kept me grounded in my fearless and emotionless life. The next thing I knew all the big words had started to shift on me: Adventure, Success, Friendship, Marriage, Feminism, Love, Morality, Home, Safety – before long I wasn’t able to make anything stand still. Everything that was a mountain in me turned into a river.

I don’t know how long it will take until I’m part mountain again.

As humans, our most naked vulnerability is our capacity to fear; we learn to run from what is right, accepting instead what is safe or appears easy. We learn how not to risk ourselves, to protect, to be selfish, to avoid love but in doing so, we forget what it really is to live.

Posted by itp at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I miss my dog(s).

Posted by itp at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Always remember I was the one that said it first.
At least, I think I did.
Unless you really did whisper it to me that night.

Thats the problem with people like you,
everyone is trying to get you to notice.
attention.
and I don't compete for placement.
I won't, yet I am.

Put yourself out there my friends say,
don't hope,
don't expect.
Whatever you do don't hope.
No, not hope.
do not think either.
hope is just disappointment in disguise.
sad. broken. hurt. fragile.

yet she hopes, and hopes and hopes.
she makes the mistake of falling into hope.
she has been here before.

People fall at her feet,
she does not see them.
there is a line, her friend said.
she does not see it.

People love her,
everyone loves her.
Yet she never feels a single one of them.

she makes her heart into a box
gold on the outside and hard to see inside.
There are bars around it, they built.
keeping them out.
she had the key,
she hides it from herself.

People try and capture us,
people try to capture him
she tries to capture herself.

she builds walls around her.

keep an eye on the door,
bags packed,
she always sits near the exit.
keep an eye on the door,
be ready, always be ready.

Posted by itp at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How does communication function in our relationships and what implications do fear play in love?

I find myself constantly censoring my feelings mostly as a result of vulnerability and fear. Often times I catch myself saying one thing when I feel something at a deeper without thinking about the long-term consequences because I simply fear rejection at some gut level.

Where does the boundary shift occur and how does it occur when we are no longer bound by verbal communication and what if there was a way to communicate without saying a thing?

I want to play with the duality of semiotic language in our everyday communication, namely the role of unverbalized dialogues of conscious meaning and the superficial. The underlying theme of the work is much less about the process however and more about the content of the audio, I want to pull much of the inspiration from my senses assignment. Namely the dual experience of the spoken and unsaid and how the dialogue shifts dynamically when both are available to the other participant. What would happen if we could hear not only the verbal but also the underlying thought? And what would that dialogue look like?

My current prototype houses the speaker output in the hood of the jacket, the hacked mp3 player in the sleeve and the switch being either a wireless reaction or a physical connection which triggers the play of the audio. My goal is to use zigbee or a reed switch or simple circuts to cause the jacket to react depending on how the user drapes the material while wearing it. I don’t want the project to be about the technology; ideally I would like to keep the execution of function out of the conversation. The wires, speakers and housing will not be visible to the users, nor will how the switches function in any way externally obvious. Dialogues heard might be something like this

I am drawn to the idea of creating a 'connection' that would turn the switch in a multifacited ways depending on how the user connects or puts on the garmet. I feel the key discussion in this piece is the miscommunication of needs and fear much more then it is a single dialogue, it is a multiple dialogue piece and reaction or narritive depends solely on how each user decides to wear it (eg do they zip it? do they drape it over their shoulder or button one button and not the other?) each circut will have a story attached to it which will only be heard when you connect a specific switch (eg a button zipper or physical contact with the garmet), hence each person who wears it will choose the narritve they hear.

I see this being much more a performance piece then a product viable for large-scale markets or sales. I am simply interested in starting the conversation of miscommunication and how every single thing I believe we say is almost always misinterpreted through either cultural, social or emotion filters. Every single person in this world is raised with every single word having a different meaning and every single person as a result defines everything different then the person next to them and no where is this more apparent to me then in our most intimate relationships with others.

Similar Projects I have found was items like AwareFashion, by Richard Etter, Diana Grathwohl, Sigmund Homolya which are clothes that react to invisible communication technology in the surrounding and since most people wear mobile devices the system also enables the wearer to sense the presence of other people.

Posted by itp at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've always preferred it when things get a little complicated, a little hard to explain. that's when you know it's yours, when you're the only one who understands even though it might not make a lot of sense on paper.

i remember the first time where i felt i had control of my life. it was a day that i developed an unwaivering belief that the world owes me nothing, that nothing would ever be given to me, and most importantly, that i cannot do everything, that i would eventually be forced to pick sides, make choices, and occasionally fuck up in a really big way. i was sixteen. junior year in high school. a week before christmas. i sat in the front row, right beside the door because i knew things were not going to go well.

in front of me sat a six page calculus exam. questions on matrices, on factoring, on derivatives. none of which i knew anything about because i preferred hanging out in the dark room developing film than going to math class. i stared for about 20 minutes. questions like "what is the derivative of x^3-3x+4/ 2x^2+3x-2" drawing only blanks in my head. i didn't understand what any of the symbols meant anymore. i put random numbers and variables and equal signs in the spaces provided.

i got about half way down the first page before it occured to me that i was stressing out over something i didn't care about, will never care about, and will never have to think about again after walking out that door. then it hit me like a punch to the back of the head. i crossed out the last half of the page. then crossed out page two. three. four. five. six.

it was my first "i don't give a shit" moment, the first one that would change the direction of my life, the first of many that would follow.

handing in the exam, i said, 'this is not what i want to do.'

he nodded. i knew he was disappointed. he knew me well. he was my soccer coach. he was the first person who ever put me in a leadership position by naming me captain of the 96-97 team. i knew he knew. he never gave me any shit about never attending class.

since then, i've felt like a pinball, going where ever the bumps seem to take me, colliding against bright lights, rolling into dark corners, drowning between two flippers waving frantically, occasionally hitting the jackpot, and sometimes going to the bonus round. i feel as directionless now as i did on that december day, but as i continue to make the choices that smooth out the pavement, things are starting to make a little more sense, albeit very metaphysically. i still don't have any answers, but i feel better prepared to handle the questions.

i guess this explains why i get caught up in the moment. the moment is all there is. i can't live in the future anymore, and while sometimes i'd like to change the past, that's just wishful thinking for wistful early mornings. everything is now, everything is transitory and always shifting, definitions change, everything goes away eventually, and i've been shocked too many times by how short now can be.

Posted by itp at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

at it's most basic, your whole life is just a collection of moments. sweet moments, happy moments, long and bitter ones, moments in the rain, ones that you'd rather forget, moments that send a shiver down your spine, moments that never happened like blown kisses that never got caught. and those moments, those memories, they never really have any order to them. they're scattered across the vast plain that sprawls endlessly in the back your mind. but in the mess and the haze, there are always beginnings, where it all started, and it's not until you're given a little time to absorb it all that it suddenly hits you, that you can say, hey, that's it, that's where it all began.

I've started my jackets, I'll br trying to learn how to use a zigbee over break along with a crash course in pcomp and circuits. I ordered some reed switch samples from here which hopefully will show up soon, Im also going to start thinking about the content of these pieces and what specifically I want to communicate. I'm interested in semiotics in our relationships and the misinterpretation of communication esp. relating to intimacy in thought, love vs fear or is fear and love the same, they are simply miscommunicated as different?

" In semiotics, the concept of a code is of fundamental importance. Saussure (1857–1913) emphasised that signs only acquire meaning and value when they are interpreted in relation to each other. He believed that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was arbitrary. Hence, interpreting signs requires familiarity with the sets of conventions or codes currently in use to communicate meaning."

I also have been reading a lot of text in neurosciences and recently read some research on the mirror neuron. I'm intertesed in their importance in language acquisition, meaning, and how these may relate to semiotics in our everyday behaviors.

Whats interesting about them and how they ultimately are a part of my project is their role in relationships. See, stronger EEG responses (related to the mirror neuron system) have been recorded in women compared to men. This finding is consistent with the idea that women tend to be more empathetic, that the mirror neuron system is related to empathy, and that weak responses in the mirror neuron system could be linked to a masculine mind and to autism. Women are four times more likely to cry then men, perhaps because men needs physical signs to sense pain while women are able to pick them up in a much more slight level of nonverbal communcation. If women did not exhibit tears, its quite possible men would go often without notices their pain. The mirror neuron system is not about imitation however, it is about understanding other people, and why they do what they do.

Posted by itp at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

you stare into the bathroom mirror. it's the same face every time. it's almost funny really -- you never look like you imagine. you run two hands through that messy mop of hair atop your head, and force that rain to run down the back of your neck. you peel off the shirt, tossing it aside, a crumpled mess on the floor. "i'll pick it up later." you unbuckle your belt, and as you make your way to the kitchen, you feel your pants fall from your hips with every step, clinging for dear life, and you wonder why you can't let go like this.

you collapse into the same familiar chair, in the same familiar house, far away from most of the noise, the people, everything. it's funny, this distance thing, when you find yourself detaching, disengaging, and stepping backward. he lets you see the mess you'd otherwise miss at a whisper's reach. "i've been wrong", you say. it wouldn't be the first time. or the last time for that matter. especially when you know you're going to make all the same ones again tomorrow. that's the problem: some messes shouldn't be cleaned up, sometimes being wrong is more satisfying, and getting caught in a downpour means being washed away by his landslide.

Posted by itp at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

we (hatti + i) got some headway tonight, looks like we'll need to talk with the gurus to get our arrays working but I think we are going to pull of this project really quite well.

I'll post more when my programming brain wears off tomorrow but for now its onto the next project.

Posted by itp at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll tell you that i feel like i've been chasing a ghost too for the last little while. seeing things that aren't there. distracted by spectacle and smoke signals. solid from a distance, empty and waivering up close. and i can say that when you do it to yourself enough, see what you want to see for long enough, it sort of becomes impossible to discern what's actually there. so eventually, you find yourself taking what you can get, when you can get it.

and that's the problem with ghosts. the feelings are real. but they're for nothing.

Posted by itp at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

sustainable practices has got me . . . discouraged. The brightest and most intelligent people I know are spending the majority of their lives stagnant behind computer screens, typing away. Change is active yet we are idle.

The world is going on without us, and not a single person here is doing a thing about it. we sit, we talk, we sit some more. the pattern is the pattern for a reason.

I guess I keep hoping for some moment of enlightenment which will somehow solve all the problems with one mathematical solution that I can answer by the time my thesis roles around in December. why can't it be as easy as e = mc squared? why do i feel like no one else cares? (because I guess really, they don't).

I think as humans we forget we have no right to be on this earth, we feel entitled instead of remembering everything is limited. We believe we deserve this life, when the earth really could care less.

I fight with myself on a daily basis, practice what you preach. yet I spent hours a day consuming electricity on my computer, I eat non sustainably grown foods, I order coffee all the time in cups I trash soon after, i take planes across oceans more times then I can count in a year, I wear cashmere, I don't always recycle. I am just like everyone else, I have no belief simply because I am 'aware' of the economy and opportunity cost I am any better then the person eating a big steak shopping at walmart driving an suv.

I am here too, consuming, ruining, taking up space, I'm sure my life is responsible for many deaths of many acres of rainforest and animals that my grandchildren will only hear about because there will be none left for them to see because we destoryed them all. Nature will be contained in zoos and we will all be dying of cancer at 30 and wondering why the icebergs have all melted away and why the birds vanished and the ones still here no longer sing.

my notes from the guest speaker:
Material suppliers with corporate contacts allow for more drastic scale then small changes
Access to supply chains and manufacturing at global scale

Posted by itp at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I've been working on the code for our motion tracking project for the last two weeks, I've been writing everything in Java and C. .. things were going ok, then Hatti and I had our meeting with Danny.

After we hashed out some object oriented programming, we concluded we had to start over, again. We did the math, we've started the code and I'm hoping we can have this thing up in beta before I leave for break March 14.

anyone else want to hold on for the ride?

Posted by itp at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reading this publication was depressing.

While the public is willing and somewhat excited to see development in this area, or so it is suggested. I would argue that current 'real world' product launches have been huge failures. Levi's jacket was a great example, failure was also a result in my opinion of the target market for the item and price points not aligning with the demographic. Industry still lacks the education about who their market is and what they can afford or are willing to pay.
Adapting, educating two very established industries (textiles and electronics) and finding ways in which two extremely different industry can merge or even begin to communicate to each other in the same language will be perhaps our biggest challenge we face in mass market production of wearable technologies.

Posted by itp at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hauser research describes the seamless attrition from machine to humanizing of everyday objects, specifically clothing. I believe her thesis can be carried not only from clothing but to many other aspects of our life (even how a person customizes their cellphones by the way it is dropped or cared for is totally unique to every phone, for example).
Every piece of clothing or objects essentially have a 'bar code' which is incorporated by the manufacturing methods, users use, and wear of the items and so on. We shape the ghosts and spirits of the fabric, so they may haunt us later.
More so, the item which we receive often has woven into it, its own historical map of the products lifespan, much like a human, all items carry history, regardless of how new. Items can be tracked down to a date of 'conception' and even a location in some circumstances.
I am extremely curious as to what the larger scale implications are of having these sort of 'serial numbers' on everything we consume. Is the clothing article a map of its own history, or are we the history of the clothing? and which aspect is more unique or important: The items history before purchase, or the history it creates when we utilize it?

Posted by itp at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

circuits are like relationships.

they are complex and require patience, done right both emit a light.

Posted by itp at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i hate how he can keep me up without saying a word.

Posted by itp at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've changed my final project . . . again.

I'm really interested in working with the dual audio stereo outputs and incorporating this into something wearable. I want to play with the duality of semiotic language in our everyday communication, namely the role of unverbalized dialogues vs the superficial.

I have been playing with the idea of utilizing the conductivity of zippers and snaps as switches. The underlying theme of the work is much less about the process however and more about the content of the audio, I want to pull much of the inspiration from my senses assignment. Namely the dual experience of the spoken and unsaid and how the dialogue shifts dynamically when both are available to the other participant. What would happen if we could hear not only the verbal but the thought?

I am currently researching different audio output options and alternative ways of incorporating switches, possible fabric options and placement of hardware.

I am drawn to the idea of creating a 'connection' that would turn the switch only when two people are physically touching or close. Another option would be more of an external audio output worn only by one person and would not be dependent on another user. I feel the key discussion in this piece is the misscommunication of needs and fear much more then it is a single dialogue.

Posted by itp at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)