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.













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Techno Fashion hits Ready-to-Wear

Body | Artist | Surgeon

While I cannot agree with New Media artist Stelarc's premise that 'the body is obsolete' - yet - who can argue with his pre-millennial statement:

The body is neither a very efficient nor very durable structure. It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly; its performance is determined by its age. It is susceptible to disease and is doomed to a certain and early death. Its survival parameters are very slim - it can survive only weeks without food, days without water and minutes without oxygen (1998)

This is the first in a series of posts exploring intersections of art & surgery. Blame Carnal Artist Marie Orlan, whose work I was first exposed to as a HAMS student @ UCL.

The hybridization and augmentation of the human form motivated by reasons other than reparation & disease are contemporary realities. Plastic surgery and prosthetics have evolved from servicing compensation and lack (mastectomy, amputation) to re-forming the body to aesthetic or idealized visions, enhancing sensory capabilities and eventually to serve a Transhumanist agenda.

Nevertheless, the traditional definitions of surgery -- along the lines of 'a medical procedure involving an incision with instruments' -- are consistently appended with references to purpose of 'removing diseased tissue', 'to repair damage' and 'work of treating diseases, injuries, or deformities'.

Collaborations between surgeons and groundbreaking artists necessitate that traditional definitions be updated. To quote Stelarc once more,

'Altering the architecture of the body results in adjusting and extending its awareness of the world.'

Surgeons are moving beyond those roles prescribed by drug companies & HMOs, and are becoming complicit in the redefinition of the human form, and eventually what it is to be human.

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

Bio Art - Labmade Life Forms in Art

As current technologies are changing our perceptions of the body, bioart, also called "wet" art, "moist" art or "biotech" art, is bridging the gap between science and art. Using biology as their medium, artists clone cells, grow skins, meats and livers. They explore issues ranging from the taxonomical crisis induced by life forms created through biotechnology, cultural cross-breeding and hybridization, the creation of new biological habitats, and the hymen.

For a taste of bioart, check out this BBTV video report on last week's tissue culture workshop hosted by LA's Machine Project. It was led by Oron
Catts and Ionat Zurr of the biotech collective SymbioticA, which "creates new cultural experiments in the field of neurosciences, molecular biology, anatomy physics, anthropology and ethics."



via we-make-money-not-art

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.

Killer Threads - Clothing That Harms

Having recently been hospitalized due to an unfortunate incident with a waspie, my thoughts turned to harmful clothing.

Most bewitching were Gordon Savicic's 'Constraint City - The Pain of Everyday Life' and Stahl Stenslie's 'Walker'. Stahl references suicide bombers and a culture in which death is aestheticized while Savicic focuses on (painfully) mapping digital technology's new arenas and interactive spaces on the body. Both projects fetishistically engage and update the tropes of clothing as shelter for the body and of corsetry immobilizing the wearer.

The Walker, a "suicide corset", is a corset placed around the waist that tightens itself a little bit for every step you take - until it is so tight that the wearer suffocates.

'Constraint City' is an urban project, in which a subject dons a corset equipped with servo motors. As the wearer walks about, the corset picks up digital signals in the environment, which reveal their strength by proportionally tightening in the chest of the wearer. Wireless networks spread all over the urban territory are then mapped onto the wearer's own body.


Clothing typically functions as protection for the wearer, and influences how the wearer experiences movement and expresses identity in her personal, social and political environments. These themes have been explored in Comme des Garcons' "Body Meets Dress" at LA MOCA's 2006 'Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture' and Mauro Taliani's titanium weave men's shirt "Oricalco" at New York Cooper Hewitt's 2002 Skin: Surface, Substance and Design.

With the advent of feminism the constricting buckles and laces of corsetry came to be vilified. Corsets were accused of sexually objectifying the female wearer and rendering her immobile, thus restricting her from the public spheres of politics, religion and business.

Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon whereby otherwise normal people have 'tangled' senses. The real information gathered by one sense (e.g. sight) is accompanied by a perception in another sense (e.g. touch or sound).

Imagine that every time you saw the number 4, it would be eggshell blue; or every time you heard an F tone you saw a crisp purple arc half a foot in front of you.

Synesthetic perception can occur between any 2 senses. Probably the most common type of synesthesia is grapheme—color (chromatographemic) synesthesia. For the life of the synesthete, letters and numbers are tinged with a particular shade or color. Attending a cocktail party a few years ago, I was chatting about the subject when a handsome stranger suddenly blurted: ”4 is Green! Lettuce is 4!” In his 40s, this eavesdropping attorney had never known there was a name for this peculiarity in his perception. Like most synesthetes, he assumed everyone saw the way he did until an experience at school had him realize he was ‘different’, & he had never mentioned it to anyone until the day we spoke. He later discovered that his father also saw certain letters and numbers shaded. Research does indicate that synesthesia is to some extent hereditary.

Synesthesia usually doesn’t interfere with day to day life. There are 8 times as many synesthetes working in the creative professions – artists, poets, writers, musicians – than in the general population.

Many synesthetes find that having linked senses assists them in tasks of memorization. Musician Noriko Nagata who sees colors in sounds (chromestesia – colored-hearing synesthesia) reports, “As I was receiving professional education in music (I also have a sense of perfect pitch), the resonance of a sound and the image of a color have always been deeply connected. When it came to composing music, I would think, "I will make blue colored music", or think, "What were these codes I remembered in pink and beige?" during a test on guessing the right code names of tension codes. It has been my habit since I was small to feel colors and memorize things in colors using this way.”

Examples of some more elaborate forms of synesthesia follow:

Some synesthetes taste shapes: ergo the statement, ‘There aren’t enough points in the chicken.’ The taste of roast chicken made this synesthete feel a round shape in his hands, as if he were rubbing a bowling ball instead of feeling the prickly shape he expected. (Cytowic, “The Man who Tasted Shapes”, MIT Press p.11)

Others upon hearing a sound see light, color and identifiable images. ‘Presented with a tone pitched @ 250Hz amplitude 64db, S saw a velvet cord with fibres jutting out on all sides. The cord was tinged with a delicate, pleasant pink-orange hue… Presented with a tone pitched @ 3000Hz amplitude 113db, he saw a whisk broom that was of a fiery color, while the rod attached to the whisks seemed to be scattering off into fiery points. The experiments were repeated during several days and invariably the same stimuli produced identical experiences.” (Baron-Cohen & Harrison, "Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings", Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA, p.102)

MIT's 'The Synesthetic Experience' has a couple of on-line demos simulating synesthetic experience, and accounts of first-hand experiences of synesthesia.

Designing Sound Furniture

As more scientific research focuses on the perception of sound, sound as an area of artistic & cultural inquiry is gaining credibility.

The UK’s first exhibition on sound art, Sonic Boom was held in 2000 at London’s Hayward Gallery. Curated by David Toop, it featured 23 sound innovators including delicate sound sculptures by Max Eastley and an electromagnetic noise installation by Disinformation. The intention was to lift sound beyond the club and rave scene into the realm of artistic inquiry.

"Sonic Boom fills the Hayward with a series of sound installations in which the visitor encounters the mechanical and the organic, the electronic and the acoustic, the sculptural and the intangible. The exhibition creates both subtle and intense sensory experiences, offering a soundscape for the imagination."

Seven years later, the 'soundscape for the imagination' is literally translated into the tangible and a new sensory event emerges. Matthew Plummer Fernandez has created the Sound/Chair, in which electronic music exists simultaneously as design in a project that explores the translation of furniture into sound and sound into furniture. The Sound/Chair is an exact replica of a soundwave graph produced by Sean Shreeve. An experiment in mapping soundwaves materially, the piece was launched at the London Design Festival in September.

"When sound is presented in this manner, the beautiful and unexplored aesthetic of sound is discovered; a landscape of spikes and shapes that vary accordingly to the type of sound... The end result is a chair that carries the inherited aesthetic of sound and also a chair that can be heard as a sound."

Current debates on sound as art are expanded upon in Alan Licht's 'Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Catagories (2007) and Brandon Labelle's 'Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2006).