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.