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

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While I cannot agree with New Media artist Stelarc's premise that 'the body is obsolete' - yet - who can argue with his pre-millennial statement: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

How are human beings adapting to increasingly virtual environments? Belgian artist and founder of the Belgian Synesthesia Association, Dr Hugo Heyrman, has devoted 40 years to studying and experimenting with perception. His terms 'tele-senses' and 'tele-synesthesia' describe how our senses are merging with and enhanced by interactive technology.

In synesthesia, neurological cross-wiring causes senses to mingle, often with exotic effect. However, we also know that one sense links to other senses by association. In cybermedia, and touch-technology in particular, the boundaries between the internal and external, between the what is here and what is there, become confused. Our senses become 'tele-senses' - enhanced and extended in cyberspace ('tele' means 'far' in Greek). As interactive multimedia and electronic networks create uncharted possibilities of interconnection, we are enabled to expand the reach of our sensorial perception.

'Tele-synesthesia' is the synesthetic principle that is expanded and extended by means of new media: the traveling senses. It is defined as virtual interactions between the tele-senses, developed by means of new technological means in order to overcome the constraints of the human senses.

This is fast becoming reality, and in some cases, aesthetically and conceptually beautiful. Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel has developed a highly sophisticated, interactive multi-touch technology with multiple user capacity. Each pixel is a touch sensor, providing an infinite number of points that can be captured and manipulated by the user.




The user (or users) simultaneously employs fingers, hands and arms on large-scale screens, collaborating parts of the brain used for interaction with physical objects.

"By synchronising images, sound, movement and haptic experiences, electronic media are able to bring about the intermingling and fusion of one medium into another, resulting in making colours audible, visualising sound and making words palpable... Future libraries will become brain banks instead of book banks, synesthetic archives: an interactive multimedia integration of the visual, the kinetic, the haptic, the sonic, and the telematic."

In terms of adapting to virtual environments & multi-sensory learning, Heyrman concludes that synesthetes, 'Homo Futuris', have a head start on the rest of us: "because with the futuristic, telematic extension of the human senses, everything will become more and more synesthetic."


SEE ALSO:
Customizing Sensory Reality
Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes
Fusiform Gyrus Sounds good

Eating Wikipedia

Charming mistranslations can work when you're back-packing through Europe or bargaining down birdcages in Hong Kong. But how hungry do you have to be to eat Wikipedia?




Other samples of dubious Chinese menu offerings here.




When you're in the lurch, there's always Alta Vista's realtime machine translation service, where Kentucky Fried Chicken's 'finger-lickin' good' translates to 'eat your fingers off.'


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.

Customizing Sensory Reality

At October's Simplicity Event, Philips demonstrated its concept Active Glass Dynamic Daylight Window, in the context of a simulated hotel room. This energy-efficient digital lifestyle product allows for guests to use sweeping intuitive gestures to create a personalized sensory environment.

"I like to think of Philips' Dynamic Daylight Window as a practical representation of a much different
future then we might be expecting. Where we live in increasingly
beautiful and interesting environments that keep us fully distracted
from reality. Much more practical then virtual reality. The over
whelming of the senses to create fully synthetic realities is totally
impractical for the near future, but customizing reality to overwhelm
the senses, perfect."

Thx to Oliver for the submission.

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.

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).