Vogue, September 2006

A store in Tribeca where you can look down through the glass floor and see the seamstresses/design team working.
Nili Lotan
188 Duane St

I will go and report back....

Video game

Okay, maybe I'm getting into a trap of just reposting too much from PSFK, but here they lead me to another lovely project, site & maker...

Esquire wrote about this guy's video game work. It's the loveliest gaming I've ever run across. I'm so not into video games, but my dad was an engineer and we had lots of computer access in the early years and loads of hacked video games. The one I loved best was called Haunted House where the screen was all black and you were represented by a pair of eyes. You could pick up only one item at a time and you must avoid monsters and ghosts. The items can only be seen when the player uses the 'fire' button on the joystick to light a match, illuminating a small radius directly around his character; this can be done an infinite number of times, although the match only lasts for a limited amount of time before being snuffed out. I think now I loved that so much of the game was not visible on the screen but happened in your own mind, sort of a conceptual blindness....

ANYWAY, back to Jason Rohrer's games. They have low tech graphics, but complex emotional components. Here's a description from Esquire:

In Passage, you’re this little pixelated guy. You live in the stripe of color. The stripe is twelve pixels tall. It’s green. All else is blackness. Your job is to move up and down and left and right through the stripe — the “forest” — in search of treasure chests, sort of like in the Legend of Zelda....But soon you have to make a choice: share the world or keep it to yourself. You meet a girl. Your fat-pixeled soul mate. Link up with her and a heart explodes. You’re in love. Now she sticks to you as you move through the forest, less easily than before. It’s a trade-off: You can get more treasure by staying single, but bond with your “wife” and you earn double the points for every step you take. If you’re like most people, you’ll choose the comforts of companionship. Only, as you trudge across the stripe, something happens. Your pixels begin to fade, gray out. Your hair recedes by degrees. Your wife slurs into a matronly shape. It hits you: This is going to happen to me. Age, decrepitude, ugliness.

Another lovely hi tech/low tech intersection.....

3 related projects

PSFK often links to really great projects, and sometimes I find several over a series of weeks or months that just seem to speak to one another. See the 3 below:

Blurb
Project
Creator
"Each month or so, we release a new issue of "i left this here for you to read." We then leave them in public places (such on park benches, on buses, in airports and dentists' offices...) for anyone to take--free of charge. Currently, we distribute our magazine in about 25 cities in the US and Canada....This project was started by Tim Devin, but now involves more than 100 people."


Blurb
Project
Creator
"For our latest mission, 20 Improv Everywhere agents personally welcomed home total strangers at JFK airport. Grabbing first and last names from car driver signs, we greeted strangers with personalized posters, flowers, balloons, and a 10-foot wide banner reading, 'Welcome Back.'”


Blurb
Project
Creator
"Visitors can buy a T-shirt of their own choice, the only condition being that they share a bit of personal information about themselves, or more precisely: their name and address. When paying for the T-shirt at the museum-shop, the information is automatically mapped in Google Maps, thereby making it possible to see where each T-shirt ends up after leaving the museum."

passage quilts

Craft posted about Passage Quilts and while this project is totally low tech, it's so in sync with my interests lately. I can't stop copying and pasting quotes from teacher/maker Sherri Lynn Wood....

"Begining with the architecture of the clothing, these quilts are pieced without a predetermined pattern. This process provides the maker an opportunity to examine his or her life patterns."

"The resulting quilts reflect the relationship of the maker to the materials, retain a sense of the body, and in the case of bereavement, carry the consoling essence of the beloved."


"Making a Passage Quilt is an external, hands-on experience that mirrors and reflects the interior process of bereavement and transition."

"Often people express a fear that they may be overwhelmed by grief and I remind them that they are simply, always making a quilt. This process provides a safe container, which will enable you to literally touch your grief and stay present to the task at hand."

Leah Buechley

Leah Buechley is someone I found in my research for my MA dissertation. At that time I saw a lot about her printed circuits and smart textile work. I recently found her talk about High-Low Tech craft and while I do think it's really interesting, it still doesn't quite touch on my interests. I love the concepts and the ideas behind it, I'm just not that into the actual materials and product output of this sort of craft. A quote:

This talk will discuss this "new craft", envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about "high-low tech" devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones.

Do you really want a temperature-sensing scarf? Maybe it's just me.....what do you think?

Disappearing ink!

Okay, it's really self-erasing paper, but it's still awesome! (although I think I'd rather have ink....)

Mobile Darning

Agh!! The most lovely project!

The Free Mending Library in San Francisco. PSFK writes:

On his old ice cream cart-style, treadle-operated sewing machine, [Michael] Swaine sets about mending and altering people’s socks, jocks and frocks and it’s all for free. Michael is interested in engaging the community to rethink their relationship with clothing and the disposable nature of fashion.

See more here.

crow vending machine

This is an old one, even for me, but it's just such a sweet project I can't resist. I'll keep it short so you can just check out the project itself.

The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.

Dress

Saw this post on Make about a thousand weeks ago, but only recently clicked on it at home—all video content blocked at work :( and it led me to Electric Foxy (which is awesome) and described by writer/founder/whatever Jennifer as:

Clothing is a core part of our expression and offers ways for us to communicate who we are and the context in which we live. Technology enables a richer connection with people and our environment and offers a new platform for communication and expression. By merging the intimacy of clothing with the empowerment of technology, electricfoxy garments strive to enhance our lives and offer a much richer language for self-expression.

As you may have gathered from my work since leaving CSM, I'm less interested in the technology aspect as I am the human connections and communication involved in clothing and fashion, but nevertheless I still find sites like this fascinating.

Back to the original spark for this post, I finally ended up on Exercices de Style's website to see their Walking City kinetic dresses. The video over on Make Zine does them no justice. See some still images below and then click to see the videos here. I love the way Ying Gao talks about air and clothing. That's something I really relate to.

Ever since Justin & I went to Montreal in December, I've been dreaming about that city, but now I'm even more intrigued.....

Learning

Over the last couple months PSFK has posted about various learning related items that I found really interesting....

Sophie Howarth was a speaker at one of their conferences and she runs a small shop called School of Life which runs classes about how we should live. Not only is the website just lovely (truly an aside), the classes sound amazing. Last fall, Alain de Botton ran one of the "Holiday" classes called Heathrow Airport with Alain de Botton that explored the idea of Heathrow airport as a destination instead of a point of transport. Another of my favorites are the Meals they put on. All strangers eat together....just check out the links and look around. You won't be disappointed.

This one might be defunct by now, but The Temporary School of Thought (definitely closed upon further investigation). PFSK describes the school as:

Classes take place in a beautiful townhouse and range from “infrastructure for anarchists” to book binding, laughter workshops, bicycle maintenance and gardening. Everything is free, the event is dedicated to the admirable ideals of mutual learning and skill sharing rather than making money.

This last one is less a class and written about as more of an enterprising approach to getting new work, but I think it's also an interesting concept in learning. John Morefield is an ot of work architect who has set up a booth at a local farmer's market in Seattle offering architectural advice for 5¢. Really, he's gathering contacts and referrals for new work, but what I think is interesting is the learning experience the shoppers at the farmer's market are getting. Think about how nice it would be to be able to pick the brain of someone in any profession...chatting with a plumber or train conductor or someone who works in a food processing plant. Think of how much interesting info you could absorb. It's sort of like having someone in the family who does a job like that. I love this idea!

oh my read this:

Kemistry Gallery's First Impressions Last show in November at the London Gallery space:

Part performance-piece, part exhibition, part guessing-game; Kemistry Gallery and Fallon London have collaborated to challenge your self-image. We invite you to have your portrait written by five diverse people: from a rapper to a romance novelist. What will they think of you and how will they differ in opinion? How well do you know yourself: would you be able to identify the five different versions of yourself on a wall of others?

I wish I could have gone! Such a lovely concept. Read the press release too!

It reminds me of a guy I saw on the corner of Bedford and N7th in Williamsburg this summer. He had a typewriter and a sign that said he would give you an honest written critique of your appearance for $2. I was on my way to dinner with friends and promised them I would stop and do it on our way home, but of course he was gone and I've regretted it ever since. I have never been able to find any info about him online either. Please drop me a line if you've seen him or heard of his performance, I'd love to find him again!

Janice Jakielski

Really loving Janice Jakielski's work! She lives in Boulder, CO and just started teaching at Metropolitan State College of Denver (where I took a few classes while I lived there, aw!). She received her MFA in Ceramics, but made these beautiful wearables that are about exploring our sense of touch, hearing, and sight:

See her site for closeups and to see them in use. Sweet!

2 projects

Catching up on my RSS feeds this morning I saw two interesting projects posted about on PSFK the trend and forecasting website:


Urban Rabbit Hole
I think this one sounds cooler than it really is, but maybe I'm just not a t-shirt person? What they do is make t-shirts with a print of lower Manhattan and mark them with red dots to mark places that have significance for you so that each one is completely individual to the wearer. They are only doing limited runs, and you have to jump through hoops to get an invite. I admit PSFK describes it a lot better than me, but it sounds like more hype than anything else in practice. Although I do think it's a lovely idea, don't get me wrong. You cna participate (and tell me how it goes) by entering the code newyorkoct#11 on this website.


Take A Seat
This one is definitely cooler than it sounds. Well, it even sounds pretty awesome. It's a project aimed at putting more seating on subway platforms by just putting chairs on the platforms. Jason Eppink is the artist (dude?) behind the project and he is encouraging collaborators to join him. You can see the Flickr set here (cheesy logo/graphic, lovely pics). Also see his blog website Self Referential Title. I like the personal sites :)

I admit I also have a wicked awesome knitter/artist website to post about, but I keep putting it off because I want to write something that does it/her justice because I'm just a bit in love with her work....I will tell you all about it soon though, I swear.

2 community sites I never heard of before

have you?

Ravelry, a knitting site

and

Fashioning Tech, a sort of social networking site about smart textiles.
This one I know a little about (I joined), it was started by Syuzi Pakhchyan who recently wrote a book of the same name. I'm not really sure what to do on there though :P

If you're on Fashioning Tech "friend" me! I'm still waiting for an invitation to Ravelry, but I'd love to hear insights or reviews of the community!

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.

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.

Did you see this?

It was here recently, with this info:

Takkiainen...is designed to help the wearer to get in contact with others. Since we brush against each other every day as we move around in the city, we can use our clothes as a medium for meeting people and communicating with them. The jacket is made out of Velcro strips of different widths that have been sewn together side by side to form alternating hook and pile stripes.

And from there I clicked to the designers sweet website:
www.com-pa-ny.com
And then I saw all of their other awesome work, my favorites:


Dance shoes


Beard wear

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.

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!

Audience participation

Photo by J.J. Tiziou

In art magazine Esopus I read about a dance performance called CELL put on by the Headlong Dance Theater. It attempts to create a performance for one audience member at a time. The piece asks some really interesting questions like 'Who is part of the performance? Why is everyone always on their phone? Am I being watched?' The performance culminates with the audience member engulfed in a private dance that is all their own. The piece premiered at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2006. There were 200 audience members overall (which means the piece was performed 200 times!).

I think there are a lot more interesting questions that this piece addresses like: Why is the connection between maker and audience so important?
Why is this group trying to heighten or change that connection?
Where is the line between performer and voyeur (presumably the audience of one is still watching to some degree although s/he is also participating)?

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.

Smart Textiles

Angel Chang, A/W 2007
Thermochromic ink on lining, fades with body heat

So this spring I was working with the up and coming fashion designer Angel Chang, and while the collaboration hasn't resulted in a finished project (price and production problems pretty much killed the piece), it was a good experience to work with a designer who's interested in similar techniques as I used in my graduate work at Central St Martins. Angel and I tried to bring my work with printed latex to her S/S 08 collection. She was interested in my ideas on clothes & prints that change over time. You can see the latex jackets I did at CSM here. My idea suited Angels' interests and we thought it would be a great new technique to add to her stable. It was my first time collaborating with another designer and I really enjoyed working with her. I also learned a lot about bringing one's own collection to market! (contracts, payment, costing, sourcing, buyers, whew!)

Angel is described on her website as someone who "explores bleeding-edge trends in fashion and technology." While we have slightly different interests in technology (narrative and time are more central to my work than the actual technology), I really admire her attempts to bring interactivity and new technology into the world of clothing and fashion. Angel's done a lot of work with thermochromic inks and 3-D print technology that I find fascinating. The other thing that I find admirable about Angel is that she is interested in collaboration and readily admits that the technology aspect is not her forte, but that she is determined to bring a wider audience to these techniques and experiences.

Below are some of the images from Angels first collection:


Angel Chang, S/S 2007
UV ink, print appears with sunlight


Angel Chang, S/S 2007
3-D print on hem