Comments on: exhale: breath between bodies

by: Feature Extraction » Blog Archive » Wearable Data Architecture

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:39:59 +0000

[...] a’wearable data architecture’ called ‘whisper’ that senses physiologicaldata & visualizes this information through ‘physical computing’,including haptics, sound & light. for instance, the clothing iscapable of translating gesture, breath & heart rate into digitalsignals, which is then decoded as sound or vibrations. custom electronic systems aesthetically hidden within the clothingreceive live data from various sensors (e.g. heat, touch, brainwave,position, or pulse). specialized software on wearable computersembedded within the garments then analyze the physiological data, &translate it into a wearable visualization (e.g. via muscle wire,motor, piston, speaker, or display). the fabric-layer architecture is designed for flexibility, as eachgarment can have a different layout of sensors & patches, with thefabric being applied over other materials or incorporated into thegarment structure directly, as translucent panels or technologicalhighlights. see also wearable synthesis. [sfu.ca & siggraph.org|via wrt.ucr.edu & turbulence.org] [...]

by: Jeremy Douglass

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 03:30:42 +0000

Mark, some thoughts on followups, perhaps merging my "lightwriting / biowriting" interests with your "wearable" thread into something even textual: LED Tank Top which plays the game of life. The Soft-wear: Active Materials workshop of Open Lab. Some of the contents of the we-make-money-not-art wearable category.

by: Jeremy Douglass

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 08:51:09 +0000

Christy, I think you are absolutely right - the cultural category of "craft" / "crafts" in general is the gender ambiguous territory here - in fact, ambiguous territory in general, without the strident claims of engineering, or art, or design. Craft is about the personal pursuit of what works, aesthetically or mechanically. Readymade and Make Magazine belong on the same workbench.

by: Christy Dena

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 05:35:58 +0000

I agree. I’ve read feminist views of new media writing and so on. And I have seen new media writing as bound in ‘the other’. I just like looking for the points of transgression. And I found the inclusion of tools that each gender has been associated with on the same table as being a good sign. I’m wondering what factor is the binding element. I don’t think it is technology, but perhaps creation, more specifically, hand-crafted creation.

by: Mark Marino

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 04:14:56 +0000

Your figuration of “boys toys” and “girls toys” seems productive, Christy. I’m reluctant to ever narrow an endeavor to one gender, but I don’t want to lose the purposeful engagement with notions of women’s spheres, such as fashion, sewing, and modeling, even if (and no doubt also calling attention to the fact that) fashion design itself is heavily influenced by male designers. Further, the project of locating embodiment in digital technology seems part of a larger engaged feminist project in works of critics such as N. Katherine Hayles. Again, I don’t want to reaffirm gender binaries here, but I do see connections (speaking of networks) between this work and certain nodes of specifically feminist critical discourse on new media.

Re: another Pandora’s Box: I used “women’s” instead of “feminist” because feminist does not seem to be (and perhaps never was) a universally accepted term among critics who work have theorized along these lines– and perhaps at this point critics have given up on a notion of a “universally accepted” term, especially given the problematic history of a “feminism” that has in the past predominantly spoken to and for white middle-class feminists. Writers Recommend Terms here…