serious chop up job - apologies in advance :)

Me and you: micro-structures in public space


Concert story [private]

At the Depeche Mode concert last night, I was wearing silver stiletto heels and black trousers with lots of zippers. My friend Vanessa was also wearing black, with copper heels, and we both wore old-school leather jackets with lots of hardware. This was not my ordinary costume. It was a personal fashion show, a performative artifact that seemed appropriate for the nostalgia. I penetrated the performance and became an active participant. All dressed up I could play and transgress and engage in non-professor-like behaviour.

Microstructure 1
Clothes as disguise/communication/performance

Clothes as disguise create microstructures that function at many social/cultural/psychological levels.
“Digital technologies allow us to shape and edit that evidence to reflect more subtle – or more poetic – aspects of our identity and our history. Patterns of touch, stress, and bending within garments (the subtle wrinkles of time and use) can be quantified digitally and utilized to reconfigure physical patterns and additional characteristics of those garments. Gestures and personal history can, in this way, be perceived, manipulated, and represented on displays integrated into the fabric. Collectively, these digitally-augmented garments change and modulate social interactions."

City story [private]

My baby likes to sleep in public spaces, safe in her buggy, the movement of our walking calms her down. I work on park benches, bus stops, alleyways, searching for a quiet corner, keeping out of the wind as I stumble into another afternoon's tiredness of the kind that coffee cannot fix. Walking through the city with my voice/mail/web device on mute/vibrate in my back pocket, I can access my screen and text based interfaces, I can write, email, look things up... but what I really want to know is: where are you (you, who are not here)? Are you awake? Are you ok? Are you hungry? Do you remember?

Microstructure 2
Mobile technology creates invisible communities

Mobile technologies create microstructures in many ways, with in particular focus on "virtual communities" and the invisible.
Who are we communicating with? Ourselves? Passers-by? Someone elsewhere? Are we communicating at all? Couldn’t we just be hiding? Concentrating? Keeping out of trouble?

SMS story [private]

At the same time, I was completely ignoring everything else around me, because I was busy SMS'ing all of my closest friends. My eyes were focused on the little screen of my phone, concentrating hard to deploy my mid-thirties mobile typing skills, sending messages like "I am at a Depeche Mode show!!!" and "I am wearing silver stiletto heels!!!"

Microstructure 3
Communication in language or signals

... electronic textiles and research into remote communication and presence applications that attempt to enhance communication and social interactions in HCI (human computer interaction). Projects such as inTouch [2] from Hiroshi Ishii’s group allow people to share the illusion of touch (physical force and feedback) across two remote locations. LumiTouch [3] allows individuals to sense each other’s presence through ambient illumination. Those and the countless other remote communication (indication of presence or emotional state) devices created by students in New Media programs around the world, such as the vibrating pillows, the illuminating pebbles, the heating key chains, and colour-changing orbs, flirt with the boundaries imposed on us by physical space constraints. Electronics can be used to break the boundaries of space and time, in order to create micro-worlds where we create our own realities, where we can feel our lovers and communicate through many different channels [edit edit edit]

Wearable technologies

If we define this as electronically augmented garments and accessories, will allow us not only to merge those two kinds of microstructures, but will also create whole new areas for exploration and play.
Onwards to introduce themes: intemacy, magic and memory.

Intimacy

The nearest 5 cm's around the body, the zone where the clothes is, intimate and practical at the same time.

"Clothing is one of the most intimate things that we interact with in our daily lives. Because of its extremely close relationship to our body, our (non-digital) clothing is able to witness some of our most intimate interactions; it is able to record our fear and excitement, our stress and our strain, through the collection of sweat, skin cells, stains, and tears. It becomes worn over time and carries the evidence of our identity and our history.
[where is this quote from?]

Magic

It is important to think carefully about magic.
[picture me scurrying away to find quotes and squirrel up references J ]

"Active materials (physical materials that have the ability to change over time and be controlled electronically) introduce many exciting opportunities for art and design, but also present many new challenges. These challenges are not only conceptual (how to imagine animated, interactive artifacts that have unexpected reactions or behaviours), but also political, ethical, social, environmental, and cultural."

Memory

"At the same time, with contemporary advances in potential memory capacity, we need to ask what are the design and creative capacities of memory rich materials and forms. What models of memory and mind are used in designing technologies that remember? How does our current generation of electronic textile and wearable computing technologies allow us to build memories? And, most importantly, how do we include the need, capacity, and desire to forget?"

[You know, I think there is a whole + wonderful article to be written about memory – especially in connection with historic textile crafts, modifications, repairs, alterations and hand-me-downs.]

Conclusion and end bit

No idea what would happen here – but we would work it out. Something statement/manifesto like relating to intimacy/magic/memory?