The Natural Selection of Us.
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.