Temporary tattoo

Really lovely idea.....from Yu Chiao Wang. Seen here too.

Living in a mall

Secret apartment in a mall in Providence RI.
CNN gives the mainstream view.
Kind of the total opposite of Monday's post.

Time & travel connected

On Friday September 14, 2007 at 6PM EST performances occurred across 21 cities spanning the globe. This project, called 21 Cities at Once Performed, was part of the Conflux Festival. Curated by Nat Slaughter and Hope Hilton, the way they write described the project really resonated with my interest in clothing:

As a curatorial collective, we are interested 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.

I think clothing can be a "wireless network system" that is outside all things tech-y. Ideas about social status & behavior are communicated through clothing, as well as messages of approval, resistance, and memory. I wrote a bit more about these ideas here and in my MA dissertation.

At the time of the performance I was scheduled to fly out of LaGuardia airport in New York City. I figured I would be right over the city at exactly 6PM. The idea of being over the city instead of on the streets like everyone else intrigued me. I would become a part of a whole group of airplanes in motion, which itself is actually a wireless network connecting cities.

So I decided to document my participation in the largest wireless network in the sky (surely by weight anyway!) by constructing a garment that could record my experience. I made a paper flight vest that I folded carefully and brought onto the plane and wore throughout the flight. I think the idea of recording experience in clothing is something people really do all the time. We have examples in everything from lucky socks to wedding dresses to gift garments unsuitable for wear but always cherished and kept anyway. Here's my flying experience:

BEFORE flying




AFTER flying




I flew with Justin Hardison who did a field recording of our flight, available here.

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.

oldies

Not to repost the same question all over the place already, but I recently saw this post on Mental Floss about what the oldest thing you own is. Liza, who posed the question originally, listed her page from an illuminated manuscript c. 1450. Chris Higgins, who posed the question again on the Mental Floss blog, noted the oldest thing he owned was a wprint probably from the 1950s....but even more he realized most of his belongings were no older than the 90s. This is the part that I think is most interesting. He also questions what is the oldest thing you own that you use regularly! I think a lot of people have old stuff chucked somewhere, but not really in use. He thought probably his apartment was truly the oldest thing he used regularly (1917).

The one thing I don't think either of them have touched on that interests me is how have the old things you own and use changed since you got them? I wonder if the more they change the more attached you become to them. See also Khoi Vinh and my post on patina.

I think the oldest things I own must be a children's book (Wizard of Oz or Waterbabies perhaps) or a piece of furniture, but I don't have dates on any of that stuff handy, or at all on furniture, and I've never been really bothered to find out. Definitely no books from 1450 in my collection!

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!

Patina Power

Marriage Shirt (just a few weeks in)

A great post about Designed Deterioration on designer Khoi Vinh's site Subtraction. Very excellent comments as well that mention Wabi Sabi (and a recommended book about it), Isaac Asimov, and Nazis....

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

My MA thesis

Final print dress from my MA collection All Stories Have Endings at Central Saint Martins, 2006.

So in order to provide some context for my interest in clothing and fashion I thought I would publish my MA thesis this week. I always write that I am interested in "the intangible qualities inherent in clothing like air, time, light, and action." Publishing my thesis should give some in-depth insight into that simplified version of my interests. I also hope that posting this information will show the design process at the MA level at an UK university. I have received lots of questions about my education there and whether it's what I expected or how it's different. I'll start with my project proposal, following with the body of my dissertation, and finishing with my bibliography and appendices. You can see a collage of my MA work in the portfolio area of my site from the link below.

Project Title: All Stories Have Endings
Research Question: Can one redefine how we experience design and consume fashion?

Design Rationale:
'I often try to have a beginning and an end, because emotion comes from time. but it’s a different kind of time than theatre or cinema..... it’s theatre without text, without spectacle. what I wish to do is something between theatre and installation.’ —Christian Boltanski

Clothing and fashion are traditionally concerned with space, the shape of the garment, its form on the body, etc. but I'm interested in exploring the relationship between time and clothing, whether it's the time in your life you wear something, the length of time the garment exists, or the amount of time you wear a specific item. The affects of time on fashion, dress, and clothing is little explored from a design perspective, unlike space and form.

There has always been something so fascinating to me about someone making clothes for a particular customer. I am in love with the idea that haute couture and made-to-measure clothes from days gone by carried more significance than the high street mass produced clothes of today. Not only because clothing was a more precious and expensive commodity for market reasons (oh the time required!) but because creating clothes in the craft tradition creates an intimate personal connection triangle between the maker, wearer, and the garment. Those days are fading fast because that kind of work is no longer feasible in today’s economy.

I want to explore what is so compelling to me about that sector of design and see if there is some way to keep alive the human, emotional aspect of designing clothes and dressing in our contemporary economic climate by investigating other ways of using time in the realm of dress. I think all the emotional connections and preciousness of clothing today can be related to the connection between time and clothes.

Aim of the Project:
To explore the aspect of time in dress. To consider how to make clothes that carry the emotional traditions of made-to-measure clothing in our changing economic climate and that recognize the personal and public power of clothing and dress through the creative use of time.

Objectives:
• Investigate the relationship between maker and wearer
• Investigate the relationship between woman and her clothes, specifically the narrative and emotional relationships involved and how they can be manipulated with time
• Push the boundaries of what is fashion
• Explore the connections between the process of producing the garment and the experience of wearing it
• Develop prints, silhouettes and texture through a process that takes into account the wearer without losing the significance of the maker
• Design garments, and eventually a collection (S/S 2007)

Intended Design Outcomes:
• A final collection of 6 garments, possibly including hats or accessories
• A textile collection
• Interim work and design development would include performance work developed into written and graphic communication (a book or magazine)

List of Research Methodologies:
• Questionnaires/ethnographic research • Reading • Time • Drawing/design experiments/storytelling • Encounters/performances • Written and graphic communication

Where and How Can This Lead to Design Innovation?
• Design concept: in that I will be exploring innovative ways to approach clothing design
• Marketplace: in that I will be exploring ways to produce and disseminate my clothes and accessories
• Materials: in that I may develop fabrics or surface treatments;

How Do You Locate Your Project in Terms of Futures?
• A new “fashion system” that grants status to the importance of time in dress, as opposed to the traditional view that space is the preeminent value in fashion/dress
• My work will be considering the future in that I am interested in pushing the boundaries of what is fashion as well as encouraging people to think about themselves and their clothes in new ways in regards to sustainable values (particularly introducing longevity into fashion).
• I think the future of fashion is considered somewhat tenuous right now, between high fashion and the high street, the relevance of the catwalk, and the meaning of “designer looks”, much of the fashion world is in flux. I am also flirting with playing around with ideas of technological future and how it relates to the relationships I am looking at, at least in the design development phase.

Identify Key Players in Your Chosen Field:
• Bless Collective • Maria Blaisse • Sophie Calle • Hussein Chalayan • Shelley Fox • Tess Giberson • Imitation of Christ • Nikki S. Lee • Eri Matsui • Linda Montano • Jessica Ogden • Mary Ping • Alyce Santoro • Cindy Sherman • Andrea Zittel

What Will Be the Design Direction?
• Laser etching • Digital printing • Using support fabrics as fashion fabrics (taking materials out of context is my interest here, but the key is texture and context) • Materials that change over time

Key Bibliography:
Books • The Fashion System by Roland Barthes • La Dernière Mode by Stéphane Mallarmé • Second Skin by Marilyn J. Horn & Lois M. Gurel • Material Memory eds. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, Jeremy Aynsle • Body Dressing by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth B. Wilson
Authors • Fred Davis • Efrat Tseëlon • Jennifer Craik • Marcel Proust
Magazines • Selvedge • i-D • Mirabella

Next...

...please note this piece is © 2006 Kimberly Hall. Do not copy, steal, or reproduce without permission. If you're interested in my work, please drop me a line. Thanks.

internet of the past.....

As I've been endeavoring to post every (week)day I've discovered just how much work is involved in making this "blogging" interesting to others as well as relevant to my own work. I've seen a couple of posts lately (here and here) lamenting the loss of originality on the internet and bemoaning the mounds of reused links and referrals that pass as content these days.

I really hear what these two are talking about. I've been reading/writing/posting online since 2001 (over six years!), and I do feel a difference that sometimes is wonderful and sometimes very repetitive. While it makes sense for me to post and keep track of all the things I love and find in cyberspace (tee hee) I do wonder if I'm finding enough truly interesting content to make this worthwhile. To that end, I do try to write my own critique and commentary, but man, it does take a long time to sort and write and plan these things. Funny, how doing things on the internet often starts out as a way to pass downtime at work! Now I rarely have enough downtime to keep up....

Anyway, I've found some synchronicity in my online reading lately, so thought I'd pass it on. My next big posting project will be some of my thesis work from my MA last year...might as well put it out here where it might get read....or at least get linked to!

Dylan Trigg

I found some great posts on a blog called Side Effects by PhD student Dylan Trigg at the University of Sussex in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how I found my way there from Things (my favorite!), but I did also find among my bookmarks a link for his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay. While his main interests aren't exactly on target with mine (place, architecture, urban decay seem to top his list as opposed to my interests in the body, clothing, and emotion), we do have several areas in common (time, memory, light & shadow).

The quotes I loved are:

If, as architect Sverre Fehn has suggested, the creation of a shadow constitutes the origin of place, then how does this interplay between the place of shadows and the openness of light form a dialectics of memory?

Instead of viewing this relation between shadows and light as a transitional phase, in which shadowed place eventually gives rise to the clarity of light, let us think of the relation as the formation of a dialectic between presence/absence, inside/out, and process/stasis. Here, negativity and positivity appear as shifting perspectives, spatial patterns which reach a limit and then disperse.

If a shadow is also its double, so invoking an inherently temporal dimension, then it deserves to be held apart from the perception of light. We are in the midst of the texture of surface, a texture comprised from the jagged, uneven unfolding of shadows, shades, and modulating terrains.

From this post about shadows. And a few more from the follow-up:

Indeed, such is the centrality of light to the formation of place that Junichiro Tanizaki, author of In Praise of Shadows, is prepared to state that: “In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house” (p. 28). Further still, Tanizaki goes on to describe how Japanese design orients itself around “neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose” (Ibid., p. 30). The emphasis on the neutrality of space as a platform on which shadows form underscores the dynamic texturing of surfaces, as both morphing and enduring in time.

In all of these quotes Trigg is writing about places, but i think these ideas translate well to my interests in clothing right now. I'm developing some new work based on my Shadow Dress that was exhibited at School last year. It got a great reception and I've recently been thinking I should push my ideas a bit farther.

Trigg also writes a wonderful bit about how modern lighting (he posts a picture of a bland office) virtually eliminates shadows and the implicatioins this has on our experiences in that type of environment. That one goes on a bit so I won't quote it here, some of the posts are quite long and difficult to process. I feel like I've been missing relevent academic reading lately. I'm rather interdisciplinary, or maybe there's just not enough critical new writing about wearing clothes. Either way, I'm really enjoying Mr. Trigg.

A few more links about Dylan Trigg:
Interview about his book, The Aesthetics of Decay
Review of the above book
Article about place & Startbucks

quick clips

After all that writing last week, here are just a few fun pics:


Wedding dress from the Smithsonian made of a parachute that saved the groom's life during WWII [via]



They keep saying patchwork is hot at work....
fashion ads from Ebony 70-76



National Geographic does an interesting (and disturbing) article about the "shadow person"

secrets

The website PostSecret began three years ago and is hugely well known (also for being the largest ad-free blog on the internet). The secrets very from the very depressing and scary to the hilarious. Recently the website Orato posted an article by Frank Warren the creator of the site. Orato is an interesting site in it's own right, hosting only "true stories from real people." Anyway, Frank talks about why he started the site, how it blossomed, and what he's doing now (a book and Post Secret events). At the events Frank invites participants to share their secrets in person, shows some banned secrets from the book, and for everyone to talk about secrets together.

Frank says, "I don’t think PostSecret is a reflection of a highly dysfunctional society, quite the opposite. We keep secrets for a reason, obviously. But I think the feelings, thoughts, beliefs and fears we hold in private are often the exact same thing that unite us with others. They’re sometimes the most humanistic part of us."

I think secrets are a very interesting theme, sort of related to luck somehow.....

catch-up

Seriously so many notes I haven't been able to keep up with them! I've been doing a bit of graphic design work on the side too (sound/music) so that's been keeping me occupied....



Matt Webb did a presentation called Products Are People Too in June 2007 as the closing keynote to reboot 9.0. His emphasis on experience and stories parallels a lot of my own design interest. Actually in a lot of ways this talk has nothing to do with designing clothes and textile prints (duh), but it just feels like this must be related in terms of my work. Side note: I totally need to look through this site: unboxing.com but it's blocked from work! Also, favorite line: "Products exist over time. We meet them, we hang out with them, we live life together." gee!

____________



Really nice project supported by Eyebeam that replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database. It's not scheduled to be finished until sometime this summer, but I signed up for the mailing list so I can get it when it's ready.

[via]

____________

This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It) an interesting article from the NYT byt Benedict Carey that relates to the Procucts are People Too presentation noted above. Favorite quotes:

• “'When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?' said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, The Redemptive Self. 'Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.'”

• "Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find"

• "Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become."

via Kottke who also mentions Allen Iverson's training routine (I think, therefore I slam.)

culling old links.2

I'm in love with Tim Knowles. An artist in the UK whose work depends on chance and the environment. Knowles talks a lot about the themes I am interested in: chance, process, the forces of inanimate objects (so to speak), making visible the invisible, and time. In one sense I guess his use of time is not much different than the way every artist takes time to produce an artwork, but that Knowles' considers time an important aspect of the work is clear.

I really love how he says, "The work attempts to make visible the invisible, be it the movement of the wind traced out onto paper by a pen suspended from a buoyant helium balloon, the path drawn by the moons reflection on undulating water or the forces at work within a car as it drives over the Alps."


Tree Drawings
Doubtless the most poetic images, and while I do love these the others are just as great to me. Drawings by trees.


Vehicle motion drawings
A series of drawings generated by an apparatus in the back of a car.


Postal works
Photos and video from a package (with a camera inside) as it travels through the British postal system.

more emotional/narrative projects

At the Great Eastern Hotel in London: Tiago da Fonseca - Bedtime Stories
The Great Eastern does all kinds of interesting projects with artists and designers. They have an amazing staff, and a brilliant roster of projects.
[via]

Social map: "When Andrew Enright and Heather Samples were married in 2006, they had a small wedding with a few groups of very tightly-knit friends and family. They made this graphic to help start conversations."
[via]

Ping mag from Japan talks about emotional wood furniture by Toru Shimizu's new project monokraft.



Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. This one is my favorite, but there are so many more.....makes me want to rearrange my bookshelves!
[via (but now I can't find the exact link!)]