Techno Fashion Tackles the Big Bang, Beautifully

Hussein Chalayan continues his conceptually beautiful and technologically ingenious fusion of high fashion and high technology in his Fall '08 collection.

Unveiled last week at Paris Fashion Week, Chalayan's 'big bang' dress incorporates orbiting points of light that move like planets or satellite constellations around the body of the wearer, representing the center of the universe.

Images of dress begin around 3:50.













SEE ALSO:
Techno Fashion hits Ready-to-Wear

Old Worlds and New Clocks

After an extended roadtrip enjoying the charms of Munich, Prague, & Heidelberg which included superb breakfasts, dozens of hours lost due to incomprehensible German & Czech roadsigns, and to my Kiwi/Cali thinned blood unbelievably cold -10C temps - it was with cozy relief that I logged on from home to boingboing's latest delightful post for "Old World craftsmanship meets state-of-the-art technology" DIY wooden clock kits.

Wooden-Gear-Clocks.com provides tinkerers and craft-y folks alike with kits to make their own family heirloom clocks in 2 different styles. The kits come in various stages of completion with plans & material sets for birch clock faces, gears, pendulum shaft and dowels from just $34! So even if you make a mess of the thing - as I inevitably will - you can start over for less than the price of a tank of gas.

Hopefully when I finally get started building that cute & sociable blubberbot, I'll get it right the first time, as the US$ isn't doing so well against the Euro these days.


via boingboing

Techno Fashion hits Ready-to-Wear

Once again, conceptual fashion designer Hussein Chalayan brought techno fashion to the masses for Spring '07. World politics, transformation and flux, fusing technology and science, fashion's cyclical nature, and the tendency to dress in response to the times are themes Chalayan has continued to reference throughout his career. In the S/S '07 show he created exquisitely delicate, layered pieces: five animated dresses, that twitched, folded and morphed through three decades apiece.






The artfully concealed technology of wires, corsets and pulleys was installed by London's 2DRD, who created the engineering and computer programming. For an automatically closing bodice, a magnet was gently drawn up a string. 2DRD's director, Rod Edkins expands in this MIT Technology Review article:

"Basically, the dresses were driven electronically by controlled, geared motors. We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips--the microcontrollers and microswitches--and little geared motors. The motors we used were tiny, about a third of the size of a pencil and nine millimeters in diameter. Each of the motors had a little pulley, and the pulley was then attached to this monofilament wire which was fed through hollow tubes sewn into the corset of the dress.

"Some of the corsets were very complicated. They had 30 or 40 of these little tubes running everywhere, carrying these little cables, each doing its little job, lifting things up or releasing little linked metallic plates. There was a huge amount of stuff going on beneath the clothes."

via twenty1f

RELATED POSTS:
'Killer Threads - Clothing That Harms'

Evolving Seaside Species

'Strandbeest', astonishingly beautiful kinetic sculptures which from a distance resemble giant insects or prehistoric skeletons come alive, are the progeny of artist, engineer and sculptor Theo Jansen.

For 16 years Jansen has been designing and refining consecutive generations of Strandbeest ("beach beasts") to survive autonomously in roaming flocks on local Dutch beaches. His creatures 'digest' fuel, walk by flapping their wings in response to the wind, perceive obstacles in their path through simple binary sensors and to protect themselves from harm in oncoming storms, hammer themselves into the sand.

"The beauty in these machines is their mechanical and conceptual simplicity. By copying the evolutionary process, the inventor has managed to create startlingly organic-looking machines, with a depth of creativity and beauty many of today’s electronics lack... He uses genetic algorithms to create artificial life, including a measure of “fitness” for his creations. The creations which are most successful at walking along the beach are bred together and regraded for future designs."

Constructed from the simplest of materials -- plastic tubing, adhesive tape and lemonade bottles -- the animaris' startlingly elegant walking motions evolved from trial and error. The key to their fluid movement lies in the proportions of the tubes - Jansen's 11-number 'holy code' - and on their axis of motion, which replicates the wheel.

"This may be where the future of design ought to be found. By looking more to nature around us, we can evolve creations of much greater complexity and more akin to naturally produced objects. This may be the direction we must head in to create cradle-to-cradle sustainability: rather than the clean-cut, single-function, straightforward inventions of the past, we may need to embrace the complexity inherent in nature."

In the meantime, it's not difficult to imagine these poetic beasts, many larger than elephants, as future artifacts in a post-human world, silent but for gusts of lonely winds on the shore and the hypnotic swarm-of-insects/wind-rustling-branches murmur of Strandbeests' whirring parts.