more prada love

Just a short one for today....I hope to post my Round Up over the weekend, and then more new, less internetty, things for a while. I'm burned out!

Miuccia Prada wrote a (very) short piece in Wired in June of 2003 about the space around the body. Prada did a raincoat that changed from transparent to opaque when it gets wet:



Somehow this tech-y piece feels nice. Sweet.

Biorhythm

When I was growing up, my dad and I sometimes went on road trips. To visit family mostly, which meant going to or through New Jersey. And there was one rest stop we would always brake for. This rest stop had a machine that read your Biorhythms! You would put in a quarter or 50 cents, enter your information, and you would get a printout like the one above. The science of Biorhythms actually goes back to the turn of the 20th century, and was of great interest to Freud while he was developing his psychoanalytic concepts. The back of the card explained how to read your Bio-chart. I wish I could find a snapshot of the machine itself. When it was calculationg your Bio-chart it made this great bleepy calculate-y noise. Sometime in my late teens, maybe when we were visiting colleges, the machine was no longer at our regular pit stop. I found this Biorhythm while I was cleaning out my closet to bring out the winter clothes....

There's a beautiful book explaining Biorhythms here:



Or you can get your own Biorythm readout by downloading a program for your PC (note: it's Windows only so I haven't tried it and I can't vouch for it's worth or if it even works at all). You can also try entering your data on this one for a quick readout.

Did you see this?

It was here recently, with this info:

Takkiainen...is designed to help the wearer to get in contact with others. Since we brush against each other every day as we move around in the city, we can use our clothes as a medium for meeting people and communicating with them. The jacket is made out of Velcro strips of different widths that have been sewn together side by side to form alternating hook and pile stripes.

And from there I clicked to the designers sweet website:
www.com-pa-ny.com
And then I saw all of their other awesome work, my favorites:


Dance shoes


Beard wear

Conflux

This year I celebrated Labor Day by laboring over my work. Which was difficult because of the unbelievably perfect weather, but was very necessary and actually felt really good. One of the ideas I've been working on is for the 21 Cities Performed project by Nat Slaughter & Hope Hilton for the Conflux Festival in two weeks.

The 21 Cities at Once Performed project is "a performative, global network where invited participants create public intersections to occur simultaneously around the world." I love Slaughter & Hilton's interest in "wireless network systems existing not only through the use of computers and the internet, but through a human awareness of simultaneous participation and collective consciousness." Some of my very first projects with clothing stemmed from an interest in connecting to other people. I often hope my work is a two part process. Part one being my creation of a piece, and part two being someone else's use of it. I really enjoy the idea of thinking of this connection as a wireless network.

The other great thing about the 21 Cities performance is that anyone can join in and particitpate. if you go to the website you'll see you can still enter your own idea and perform on September 14 at 6 PM EST. I'm going to be doing a piece with Justin Hardison in an airplane over New York.

we feel fine

Via PSFK I have been looking at We Feel Fine a website that I can only describe by copying and pasting a blurb from their website (much as PSFK has done) and slap up a few screenshots. It's impossible not to spend hours on this site once you start to dig around.....

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)....The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

So fun to get caught up in sorting and searching for where feelings happen and when. It feels like such a well of delicious raw data. I hope swimming around in it will be inspirational.

The mess of feelings:


The top three feelings are 1. Better, 2. Bad, and 3. Good!


A few about feelings and clothing came up while I was on:


I've also been on the Learning to Love You More website today, which is another sort of repository of raw emotion. The project is all assignments for other people to complete and the results are displayed on the website. The assignments are still listed on the website and you can still participate. Some of my favorites:

I wish I had the guts to do this one!


I would love to do a whole collection like this...


I wonder what my family's responses to this one would be...ha ha!

Audience participation

Photo by J.J. Tiziou

In art magazine Esopus I read about a dance performance called CELL put on by the Headlong Dance Theater. It attempts to create a performance for one audience member at a time. The piece asks some really interesting questions like 'Who is part of the performance? Why is everyone always on their phone? Am I being watched?' The performance culminates with the audience member engulfed in a private dance that is all their own. The piece premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2006. There were 200 audience members overall (which means the piece was performed 200 times!).

I think there are a lot more interesting questions that this piece addresses like: Why is the connection between maker and audience so important?
Why is this group trying to heighten or change that connection?
Where is the line between performer and voyeur (presumably the audience of one is still watching to some degree although s/he is also participating)?

link round up

so. many.

When I started writing online, I thought I would post something everyday that inspired me, or was relevant to my interests (that I would normally just bookmark and never look at again). But I'm finding that there are dozens of sites and links and posts every week that I want to remember and I can't do justice to. There's no time to properly write about them all. I think every Friday will have to be a link round up of all the other pages I'd like to write more about but have just run out of time. Because there will be a whole new crop next week....



Máquina desempolvadora
Adriana Salazar interviewed by Régine Debatty (lovelovelove)

...a girl who creates delicate and elegant (but slightly ludicrous) machines that smoke, tie shoes, pull thread through the hole of a needle, relentlessly measure walls, switch the light on and off, on and off, on and off, dust walls, cry while another one dries its tears....

I am a rabid convert to Style Bubble!






• Acne (here)
• Sruli Recht (here)
• Nova Magazine
• Couture Lab (here)
• I'm not sure I agree with her definititon of label-ista (I would say it's someone who cares only for labels because of their cache not because of any meaning a label carries)
• This one reminds me of my own wardrobe documentation for my MA research
• I love the way she talks about this jacket & memory


I've been reading PSFK a lot lately too. They post a lot, and while it's not always stuff interesting to me, when it's good it's very good!
• The WHY (my personal favorite...)
• Objects that age (my personal fave....no really!)
• Why looks matter
• Kate Betts on how fashion trickles up
• Smart Fabric




Just pretty from Kako Ueda via Phantasmaphile



The beauty of scale

Emotion—why did I title it this?

Last week I mentioned this article about the divide between science and art. And how "I'd like to write a bit more about this one...." so I'm trying to be inspired to write a bit about some pages I think are related. ahem:

Basically the Boing Boing post reviews an article in the Guardian that talks about the division between science and the humanities and whether there is a "third culture" that bridges this divide. They review a website, two books, and a writer. Natalie Angier's comment "Science is rather a state of mind" reminded me of this article I wrote about before. But it makes me look at that article from Business week in a different way. Nussbaum talks about "Design Thinking" (his caps, not mine), in a way that makes me wonder what is 'humanities thinking'? Is there such a thing? Or is it the same as "design thinking" and those are the two sides being talked about in the Guardian article? Maybe "design thinking" is the third culture referred to in the article? Sorry for all the quote marks....

Boing Boing also recently linked to a Douglas Adams lecture titled "Is there an artificial god?" that made my head spin (in a nice way) similar to the article above. It feels like such a lovely way to consider ideas about god and consciousness and humanity. Sadly, perhaps, it makes me want to totally live in my head and stop making things. Funny how doing a lot of in-depth reading can put me off of physical objects....it's almost like there iis a real divide between intellectual thought and physical action (hey.....) that happens so very naturally that its unstoppable. Good thing I have studio space this month or I could feel myself heading into a downward spiral of creation (or is that anti-creation?)

Moving on....a nice pair of articles that I really enjoyed finding together:

From Boing Boing, "Love, Internet Style" Clay Shirky's keynote speech from the Supernova conference in San Francisco that posits love as a predictor of technological success.

Usman Haque's own keynote speech titled "I Hate Technology" reported on We Make Money Not Art (aside: one of my very favorite blogs). Truth be told the LOVE/HATE theme doesn't exactly work because the speech was for the We Love Technology day on July 12 in Huddersfield, GB.

Gilbert Austin, Chironomia (1806), plate 9.

Finally, and totally unrelated to anything about (so much for my circular mind melt) is an article from Cabinet Magazine about gestures lost through time

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost”: so writes Giorgio Agamben in his 1992 essay, “Notes on Gesture.”

This is a pet love of mine. I did a couple of garments related to Alexander Technique in my first year of grad school. Unfortunately I don't seem to have any pictures handy, but maybe I will find some and revisit this. I love the body/garment connection.

P.S. A new blog I just started digging around on....hmmmm!

Good Make!

A round up of my recent favorite finds via Make, like yesterdays faves from Boing Boing. Tomorrow, something a bit more critical, I swear!


The breath powered USB charger by jmengel from May 16. I can't even begin to describe the ideas this piece gives me. It's top on my list to make!



"Fabber" the homemade 3D printer (1/10th the cost of a store bought one!) by roboticist Hod Lipson on May 30. This one might be a bit out of reach for my tech skillz....but maybe I can recruit my dad (although there's still the $2300 to be found!).



Brilliant wallpaper idea (the photo doesn't do it justice!) on June 13. Really such a brilliant idea, I can't believe it hasn't been done before now. I'm so into wallpaper lately, I should do a follow up post of some of my favorite wallpapers (note to self! ha). There's so much interesting work.



Sarah Hood's beautiful landscape jewelry on July 5. Of course this is something I wish I had thought of. I just want to eat that little tree.



Artist Ma Jun makes beautiful low tech electronics from China on July 7.

Smart Textiles

Angel Chang, A/W 2007
Thermochromic ink on lining, fades with body heat

So this spring I was working with the up and coming fashion designer Angel Chang, and while the collaboration hasn't resulted in a finished project (price and production problems pretty much killed the piece), it was a good experience to work with a designer who's interested in similar techniques as I used in my graduate work at Central St Martins. Angel and I tried to bring my work with printed latex to her S/S 08 collection. She was interested in my ideas on clothes & prints that change over time. You can see the latex jackets I did at CSM here. My idea suited Angels' interests and we thought it would be a great new technique to add to her stable. It was my first time collaborating with another designer and I really enjoyed working with her. I also learned a lot about bringing one's own collection to market! (contracts, payment, costing, sourcing, buyers, whew!)

Angel is described on her website as someone who "explores bleeding-edge trends in fashion and technology." While we have slightly different interests in technology (narrative and time are more central to my work than the actual technology), I really admire her attempts to bring interactivity and new technology into the world of clothing and fashion. Angel's done a lot of work with thermochromic inks and 3-D print technology that I find fascinating. The other thing that I find admirable about Angel is that she is interested in collaboration and readily admits that the technology aspect is not her forte, but that she is determined to bring a wider audience to these techniques and experiences.

Below are some of the images from Angels first collection:


Angel Chang, S/S 2007
UV ink, print appears with sunlight


Angel Chang, S/S 2007
3-D print on hem