wearable|technologies|

Like many people in class I was interested in dealing with the idea of touch. I thought of soft, fuzzy things, I thought of fresh cut grass, something that is ice cold or red hot. I drew this sketch and then kind of froze and was unable to realize it. I returned to the idea this week. I ended up envisioning a ring or bracelet that would use a small vibrating motor to animate a fuzzy fabric... I continue to work on assembling the parts more specifically figuring out a way to attach the battery and create a usable switch so that the motor can be easily turned on/off.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Valery’s “Some Simple Reflections on the Body” overflows with evocations and fascinating suggestions. Can an external machine or force do what the body does more efficiently? In what way is the mind’s peculiar activity indispensable in the preservation of life? But I found his ideas regarding the existence of the multiple selves to be the most intriguing of all. I will readily admit that I am in no way confident that I understand his precise theses, but I am bolstered by the fact that Valery himself does not purport to either. In fact after reading the final pages several times I suspect that it is this very lack of understanding that the essay endorses. In his description of the multiple selves/bodies Valery is relentless in his attempts to strip away our sense of possession, knowledge and jurisdiction over “our” bodies. Valery’s notion that everything that is not in the now is “variable and subject to illusion” only serves to enhance his notion that knowing oneself—“the substance of our presence,” our changing reflection in the glass or the gray matter that really defines us—is an impossible dream.

And yet, before I waste away into the ether of a Valery-induced self-referential nonexistence, it seems imperative to return to this riddle, which is the definition of the fourth body. Described as equally “real “ and “imaginary” and as being the product of what the mind’s knowledge is not and the three other bodies characteristics and experiences of the other three bodies, I had the sudden revelation that Valery’s fourth body might not only be refer to the “meaning” of life but also to our very perception of our lives and how we relate to it. After deracinating our psyches from the comfortable home of our bodies, Valery seems to suggest that it all points back to the mind?

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 05:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I enjoyed the introductory pages from the Susan Watkins book assigned earlier in the semester, I was absolutely dazzled by her chapter The Design Process. Because it spoke so clearly to the ideation and realization issues that I have been contemplating and confronting in my own creative process, reading this article was a simple case of the right article, at the right place, at the right time. My excitement upon making this chapter's acqauntice was somewhere akin to having read Laura Mulvey's seminal "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" article as an undergrad in Semiotics 166. As I mentioned in class, there was something very satisfying and incredibly comforting about having the sometimes murky experience that is the creation process codified in such clear and concise terms.

I am increasingly interested in this relationship between art and design. While I know definitely that they are not the same thing, I am curious about commonalities and why the relevancy of an article about design would seem so unexpected.I have always been rather ambivalent about the way that art is described as an emotional and physical process. Even though we have left the era when making art is based on your “hand skills,” we still seem to use action verbs to describe the creative process— making, creating, doing. Conversely, design is seen as a practical, cognitive process that overtly engages the mind and as a result straddling the realms of both reality and ideas. (Design is more practical after all, and good design can literally be a matter of life or death…) Although the art/design distinction is a polarity that continues to blur and shift, I was still struck by the similarities between the design and art-making processes as they are described in the Watkins chapter. Convergent/divergent, cognitive/intuitive, analysis/synthesis , mind mapping and synectics were just some of the definitions/processes that seemed both relevant and applicable.

I met someone a few weeks back who described herself as an activist designer. I have thought about it several times since then, specifically contemplating what activist design might encompass and/or be... I understood the designation to be a meta tag of sorts—to aid in the accurate categorization of her goals and desires. What I like most about the term is the use of a adjective "activist," and its connotations of motion and activity,

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 04:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Susan Watkins chapter, THE DESIGN PROCESS was of immeasurable help this week while I was working on the hack a toy assignment. Ever since PComp called my attention to the electronics and construction supporting every electronic switch or component in proximity, I've been curious about the cheap electronic toys in my local $1 store—how are they made? how do they acheive portability, affordability and functionality in such a small, inexpensive package? My idea was to explore the $1 electronics world and to attempt to complete the assignment using these toys as my primary building blocks. Several $1 stores later the idea to create a wearable musical instrument from the wedding of a wristband digital watch and a Dora the Explorer "super" telephone crystallized...

Because it was made for a MUCH smaller wrist it was a bit uncomfortable to wear. Also because I had placed the keypad inside it was all the more bulkier. But it was fun to play with and it worked best when other people played the instrument. Although it is difficult to see here—sadly my camera does not possess a macro function—I liked that you could see the speaker courtesy of the former clock casing.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was fascinated with Mann’s efforts to detourne society’s inevitable crash course towards the surveilled panoptical-like superhighway. I was particularly struck by his theory of Reflectionism as an inspiration to commit strange and confrontational works of performance art. Like the Yes Men or Surveillance Camera Players whose primary motivation is to frustrate the “powers that be” through satirical or Mann’s work resonates as both political and performative action. Political performance? Performative politics? The different iterations of Mann’s Maybe Camera project was particularly striking because each one presents a simple and easily reproducible action that is casual, fun and game-like in its execution. I love the Firing Squad image with its willing band of semi-informed activists it is reminiscent of a fratboy prank except that is replete with subversive intent.

In general I found Mann’s dedication inspiring and his methodology both fascinating and fantastical. Reading this article raised countless issues about the relationship between ideology and technology. This relationship seemed particularly striking in Mann’s coda in which he puts forth an alternative theory seems to get lost in the layers of self-justification and his claims of multiple levels of detournement. Mann’s paper seems to clearly assert that it is the way that we use the technology that is most significant and potentially harmful. It is not Mann’s desire to create a commercial product that I find so paradoxical, but it is his naivete that a device— with good, politically just intentions—will somehow remain un-tainted in the desire for increasingly “useful” technological devices. Depending on what side of the camera you are stationed and for what reasons, a computer-aided memory device that can recognize faces has the potential to either assert or impinge upon a person’s right to “own” their own image.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

High Level Idea for Final Project …………………………………………………………

Gender Neutralization Device ||Personal Transformation Device
A wearable garment or device that might enable people to shift or re-envision their sense of self, identity or place.

At some point during the first class meeting the words Gender Neutralization Device (GND) flashed before my eyes. As someone who often engages in evocative title creation well in advance, I wasn’t particularly surprised by the revelation— I just had no idea what my subconscious was formulating. I’ve spent the last several weeks investigating this idea and focusing on ways to ground the concept in specific and realizable goals. I liked the project’s title but what did it mean? A simple free associative exercise netted the following images and fragments—Joan of Arc on the battlefield, chain mail and armor, Sun Ra, drag kings wrapping their breasts to appear flat-chested, trans as identity and “transitioning” as a verb, arcane mechanical torture devices touted as “solutions” to psychological problems. After reading the excerpts from Ruth P. Rubinstein’s Dress Codes, I realized that I was more interested in the socio-cultural reasons supporting the desire for “temporary and continuant identity transformation” than I was in creating an assistive device of some kind. I was struck by Steve Mann’s use of the term “reconfigured visual reality” in his description of his WearCam sousveillance device and his focus on parallels between reality and sight. This presented the idea that the desired identity reinvention might be technologically mediated through sound and image. Obviously this is a very high concept idea. At this point my plan is to further explore actual materials—op amps to distort sounds, technology embedded in particular styles of dress.

A bank of related images can be found here…
http://itp.nyu.edu/~lg221/wearables/ideas/finalidea.html

References
• Marjorie Garber, “Cross-Dress for Success,” from Vested Interests, Routledge, 1997
• Valerie r. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe, Garland Publishing, 1996
•Charlotte Suthrell, Unzipping Gender: Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaptation..."

I joked with someone in class that this was an “anti-reading,” I think because I had the distinct impression that Simmel was speaking in facts, delivering information already known to be true. I thoroughly enjoyed this reading and found its ideas to be both persuasive and enlightening. But i did become suspicious of my willingness to accept these at times over-arching pronouncements. (Perhaps it is the knowledge that it appeared in a journal of Sociology that provoked me. Somehow theory is differnt from scoiology although I know better than to think that true).

I found one of the most interesting and memorable points to be this notion of the one-way trajectory of fashion trends. I underlined this statement in the abstract and wondered why —even from the vantage point of 1950—this seemed like a conservative statement.

This prompted me to think about when fashion and trends in general began to cross class boundaries and influence one another in a more syncretic and fluid manner. I challenged myself to come up with an example and thought about the adoption/appropriation of blue jeans in the 1950s. I found a reference to this cultural phenomenon in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluejeans): “In the United States during the 1950s, wearing of blue jeans by teenagers and young adults became symbolic of mild protest against conformity. This was considered by some adults as disruptive…”

A small point, a footnote really, but it did enable me to begin to formulate my own concurrent discourse in what was a very engaging and thoroughly convincing argument.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

graphic from a paper entitled "Exploring Cosmetic Surgery in the Socail Sciences," http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ctc27/cosmeticsurgery.html

Gender identity disorder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gender identity disorder, as identified by psychologists and medical doctors, is a condition in which a person has been assigned one gender, usually on the basis of their sex at birth (compare intersexuality), but identifies as belonging to another gender, or does not conform with the gender role their respective society prescribes to them. It is a psychiatric term for what is widely known as transsexuality, transgender identity, and transvestism or cross-dressing (GID may or may not be present in the latter).

This feeling is usually reported as "having always been there" since childhood, although in some cases, it appears in adolescence or adulthood, and has been reported by some as intensifying over time. Since many cultures strongly disapprove of cross-gender behaviour, it often results in significant problems for affected persons and those in close relationships with them. In many cases, discomfort is also reported as stemming from the feeling that one's body is "wrong" or meant to be different.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

DRESS CODES
What was most interesting to me about this reading was its organized collection (assemblage) of useful and methodical systems of categorization. Whether it was Goffmans’ the front stage/back stage/ outside region interactional model or Sweat and Zentner’s female personality types, Rubenstein provides a straightforward accounting of varying histories and sign systems imbued in fashion and styles of dress. For my purposes I was most interested in the first section about dressing the public self. As someone who has always been interested in ways that people—minority cultures specifically—define and reinvent themselves it was a reminder of some basic relationships between conduct, dress, self-expression and the larger socio-cultural realm in which they participate.

I kept an archive/file folder on people who specifically recreated themselves as aliens, robots/machines—Klaus Nomi, Sun-Ra, George Clinton/Bootsy Collins P-Funk in all of its various guises, Kool Keith to name a few—and the creation myths that accompany their “rebirths”. I thought back to this list in the section in which Rubenstein discussed believability and identity fabrication. I like the above examples because they —un someone like Orlan who explores personal transformation through physical means—recreate themselves through dress, imagination and mythos alone. One of the reasons I was interested in participating in this class was the use of the term self-expression in its title. I am interested in impermanent transitions , those that allow for fluid and multiple interpretations .

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Assignment: Make an item of clothing using the following materials: wool, cotton, leather, an electronic component, conductive fabric or thread.

I was struck by a phrase in Ruth P. Rubinstein's article regarding believability: "Believability concerning a particular identity depends on coherence between the impression one gives and the information one "gives off."...The extent to which a performer is capable of imitating a real appearance and demeanor determines his or her credibility and successful fabrication of an identity.

For this assignment I created a Sun-Ra inspired head-dress. I have always been fascinated by his self redefinition efforts and I wanted to create something that might give the wearere the look and distinct impression that they were part of Sun-Ra's Saturnian family. My idea was to create a head set that would distort "real" sounds in an effort to create more other-worldly ones. I purchased a small portable radio and then set about trying to figure out how to distort the playback.

For the casing I used a headbaand as an armature, knitted together some brightly colored wool and created some antennae-like horns on the top for a space age effect. Although far from any aesthetic I would ever be attracted to I think it did end up looking rather Sun-Ra-esque.

The plan to use the conductive materials to distort or bend the audio was completely unsuccessful! This will require more experimentation—to bend the audio— or the specific implemetation of a proc amp— to over modulate the signal. This kind of live, real-time processing is something that I am very interested in and want to continue to explore. In the meantime I returned to the project recently and just added two LEDS using conductive thread to satisfy my desire to more fully realize the piece.

Posted by Leah Gilliam at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)