Vogue, September 2006 - Dry Cleaning

Believe it or not an interesting article about dry cleaning. I really want to the stain removal kit from Madame Paulette!

Vogue, September 2007

First read this article about the technical textiles (Fabrite factory!), and through it discovered Ohne Titel....Angel Chang, who I've done some development work with, is also mentioned. Favorite quote:

"Already fashion is highly technical. Actions and reactions take place between you and your clothes all the time"—let the jeans you've worn in all the right places be an example of this.

Hi tech/Low tech

I swear this is the last content I repost from PSFK for a while!!! Here they write about designer Maarten Baptist and his new collection that goes straight from rough sketches to 3D production, entirely skipping the process that would geometrically perfect his sketches.

Another instance of integrating a high tech method with a low tech way of thinking. I think maybe this is what I've been finding a lot of lately, maybe I need to be focusing on low tech methods merged with high tech ways of thinking?

Video game

Okay, maybe I'm getting into a trap of just reposting too much from PSFK, but here they lead me to another lovely project, site & maker...

Esquire wrote about this guy's video game work. It's the loveliest gaming I've ever run across. I'm so not into video games, but my dad was an engineer and we had lots of computer access in the early years and loads of hacked video games. The one I loved best was called Haunted House where the screen was all black and you were represented by a pair of eyes. You could pick up only one item at a time and you must avoid monsters and ghosts. The items can only be seen when the player uses the 'fire' button on the joystick to light a match, illuminating a small radius directly around his character; this can be done an infinite number of times, although the match only lasts for a limited amount of time before being snuffed out. I think now I loved that so much of the game was not visible on the screen but happened in your own mind, sort of a conceptual blindness....

ANYWAY, back to Jason Rohrer's games. They have low tech graphics, but complex emotional components. Here's a description from Esquire:

In Passage, you’re this little pixelated guy. You live in the stripe of color. The stripe is twelve pixels tall. It’s green. All else is blackness. Your job is to move up and down and left and right through the stripe — the “forest” — in search of treasure chests, sort of like in the Legend of Zelda....But soon you have to make a choice: share the world or keep it to yourself. You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You’re in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It’s a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your “wife” and you earn double the points for every step you take. If you’re like most people, you’ll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness.

Another lovely hi tech/low tech intersection.....

Leah Buechley

Leah Buechley is someone I found in my research for my MA dissertation. At that time I saw a lot about her printed circuits and smart textile work. I recently found her talk about High-Low Tech craft and while I do think it's really interesting, it still doesn't quite touch on my interests. I love the concepts and the ideas behind it, I'm just not that into the actual materials and product output of this sort of craft. A quote:

This talk will discuss this "new craft", envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about "high-low tech" devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones.

Do you really want a temperature-sensing scarf? Maybe it's just me.....what do you think?

Disappearing ink!

Okay, it's really self-erasing paper, but it's still awesome! (although I think I'd rather have ink....)

crow vending machine

This is an old one, even for me, but it's just such a sweet project I can't resist. I'll keep it short so you can just check out the project itself.

The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.

Dress

Saw this post on Make about a thousand weeks ago, but only recently clicked on it at home—all video content blocked at work :( and it led me to Electric Foxy (which is awesome) and described by writer/founder/whatever Jennifer as:

Clothing is a core part of our expression and offers ways for us to communicate who we are and the context in which we live. Technology enables a richer connection with people and our environment and offers a new platform for communication and expression. By merging the intimacy of clothing with the empowerment of technology, electricfoxy garments strive to enhance our lives and offer a much richer language for self-expression.

As you may have gathered from my work since leaving CSM, I'm less interested in the technology aspect as I am the human connections and communication involved in clothing and fashion, but nevertheless I still find sites like this fascinating.

Back to the original spark for this post, I finally ended up on Exercices de Style's website to see their Walking City kinetic dresses. The video over on Make Zine does them no justice. See some still images below and then click to see the videos here. I love the way Ying Gao talks about air and clothing. That's something I really relate to.

Ever since Justin & I went to Montreal in December, I've been dreaming about that city, but now I'm even more intrigued.....

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.

I know this is supposed to be awesome:

but I'm still not into this tech-y stuff....

I feel like I should be seeing so many possibilities when I see articles about new technology like this, but I can't seem to see past the gimmickiness of it (glowing nipples! ha!). Not that this particular article is talking about using it as anything but functionally, of course.

Maybe I am still a bit scarred from my MA program, or maybe I've been reading too many posts on Make, Boing Boing, and We Make Money Not Art. Not that I don't love those sites (because I really do).....do you think I'm just on overload? Or maybe I'm speding too much time looking and I should be doing more making.....!

Edited: Another one!


Self-warming underwear! Yes, I know, so functional.

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.

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.