The Whiskey Sea

I decided to drop my Wearables and Personal Expressions class, even though it seems very promising in its critique structure and as a way of expanding one’s physical computing repertoire. Nonetheless, I’d like to continue thinking of the idea of a wearable living system—something that could functionally and symbolically link personal living orbits (i.e. fashion) with the greater environments we’re all a part of (man-made and natural living systems).

There are definitely fashion experiments with live plants, and insofar as plants constitute living systems, I suppose we could call these wearable living systems, though most seem barely “wearable”:

Yet few of these plant fashions offer a way to wear them and keep the plants alive. In fact, jewelry is probably more promising in that respect:

What would be interesting is somehow combining a living system that you can wear, which could also have a relationship to a living system beyond what you’re simply wearing. Take, as a clunky example, the moss ring above. Among other things, moss is great for air filtration, and we’re in fact in the process of building an indoor moss wall for the purposes of purifying the air. If people could also connect a moss necklace to the wall for regenerative purposes, one could perhaps both receive the health benefits of wearing moss as well as being symbolically reminded of a connection to a greater living system.

Now I have no idea how the above example could actually work, but it’s really fun to think about how we can use personal fashions to connect the self to a greater whole, and feel good and hip about it. It’s also worth keeping in mind the usefulness of wearable biofeedback systems that could help monitor your vital statics and help you be conscious of things like your breathing pattern.

This week’s assignment requires us to make two masks: one that represents you and one that hides you. I started off misremembering the assignment and had substituted “reveals” for “represents.” Nonetheless, my initial inquiries remained more or less the same after I realized my mistake:

• What “you” is there?  What does it mean to reveal myself (beyond getting naked)?  How can a mask tell an audience that I am revealing myself?
• How is my face and body a mask that both hides and reveals me?  Make-up hides my face, what does my face hide?
• I feel that listening to my iPod on the subway provides a bubble of personal space around me and to a certain extent, lends me an acceptable identity for that moment (I am a person listening to my iPod) …. can headphones and branded electronics be a type of mask?
• How can a mask signal that you are hiding something without also revealing your desire to hide it, or at least focusing on the thing you’re hiding?

Brainstorming different ideas, I settled on two:

1. Hide: a mask made of beauty adds
2. Reveal: three see-through 2-way mirrors (where you can only see the other side when the other side has light) put together in an equilateral triangle prism, which i would hold up to my face like a handheld mirror.  In order to speak with me, people would have to come up to my mirror prism and an LED would light your face when you spoke so that the two listeners could see you (as well as faint reflections of their own images) but you’d only be able to see your own reflection.

As I was figuring out how to make the second “reveal” mask, I realized that we were supposed to make something that “represents” us.  And so I developed the beauty ads idea into the concept of negotiating between (mask one) being paralyzed by or hidden behind social standards of beauty, versus (mask two) actively using social standards to mediate a presentation of myself.  The two masks are made from the same components, which are excerpts from beauty tips ads, and they demonstrate different relationships to the same social norms.

Components:

Mask 1:

Mask 2:

Soft Circuit:

Class Syllabus

• In this class we will explore the possibility of developing wearable devices & accessories as means to social experimentation and agents of expressivity and communication. As the class traces the relationship between the body, fashion, technology and social interaction students will be asked to actively explore this trajectory and develop ideas and devices around them. What would an electronic gesture be like? How can technology & fashion allow people to dynamically express themselves? What is a subversive technology? Weekly assignments will frame the theoretical discourse while a final project will help students synthesize theoretical considerations and design practices in the wearable computing spaces.

Brainsprinkles: ideas + questions (Class 1)

• Shoe Stamp: spread messages across the city as you walk
• Relationship between knitting patterns and coding/ASCII art?
• Phosphorescent clothes
• Hat Air Dispenser: carry a small living system on your head and inhale fresh air
• Biofeedback clothing: help breathe
• Think more about different cultures: the veil, burqa…
• Hair Piece: living plant
• Mixing music depending on where you walk — on-site compositions
• Consider the shoulder-elbow connection and puppeteering
• Tattooing–is that a ‘wearable’? if you can’t take something off anymore and it’s become part of your body….?
• RFID storytelling + poetry (the world in a grain of sand): combining language with clothes as hidden expressions
• Living materials: moss, air plants, fungus
• How do quartz watches work and can quartz power anything useful for a wearable?
• How does context of public or private spaces influence personal expressions in designing a wearable?