Digital skins and Body atmospheres

I knew they had the idea going for a while already, but finally they've released some work. Fashion designer Nancy Tilbury, in collaboration with Philips Design, have created a movie about the future of fashion for 2050. I love how they present their work about the cyborgization of the human body almost as a new religion of aesthetics. Their ideas include - I hope I get this right - :

- Fashion becomes an atmospherical experience, as if your skin becomes part of your natural environment. Think gaseous and liquid rather than solid.

- Fashion will become digital, but not in a push button type of way. Technology around the body becomes organically sensitive, speaking to our visceral rather than our social or our reflective minds. This is possible through the ethereal qualities that nanotechnology will allow us to develop. Think interacting by sensually touching your skin, or swallowing certain tokens.

- Digital cosmetics will be big business. Think on-the-fly modifiable irises and fingernails.

- We will be able to influence the 'natural' growth of our human body. Think growing your own shoes, jewelry and even your garments directly onto your body.





Watch the movie clip here:

Digital Skins Body Atmospheres from Nancy Tilbury on Vimeo.

Skon: a light emitting hoodie

Very interesting piece of digital fashion done by Paula Kassenaar and Paula Segura Meccia from the design department I once was a part of myself: Wearable Senses at the Eindhoven University of Technology. To me, this piece is pure aesthetics. And in that respect, it shines. Interact with the shape of the hoodie, and the light reacts. As a one-week assignment this project hasn't strewn its full potentials yet, though already it can be felt how the aesthetics of soft technology could influence our lives. I would love to see a next version of this, maybe one in which the shape of the hoodie is more kneadable, and the light reacts in ways clearer corresponding to the wearer's actions. One interesting aesthetic use could be to use the light as a body movement trail: store activity patterns of the wearer throughout the day, and create an animation from these that continuously updates. This way, technology can become a peripheral awareness system we don't necessarily interact with consciously, but that more or less creates a dynamic field that filters our incoming perceptual data, setting the tone for how we act, like a gearbox that always runs on the background and evolves over time.



( Random train of thought: this is interesting stuff for a PhD work. A fundamental question then is: what is the parameter the system optimizes itself towards? I tend to say happiness. Then, define happiness. Do people know what happiness is, i.e. would we use it as an intrasubjective concept, do we treat it as a social construct, or can you even objectively define happiness? I always say that happiness is something people can only recognize when they have experienced it enough. People can say they are happy without knowing that there are even more supreme states of being. For me, pure and utmost happiness is the being rid of worry, frustration, irrelevant thoughts, so that you are in control of your mind, and instead of identifying with the mind you are the controller of the mind. Could you steer people towards this state of being in various situations? Since this work concerns the hoodie, what would be the power of visual neurofeedback in everyday life?)

Living Dress

Lady Gaga has recently set foot on the stage wearing a mechanized dress with several moving parts, reminding us once again that the image of the cyborgized human is gaining foothold in popular culture. The mechanics of the dress seem not too complicated when compared to, say, Hussein Chalayan's creations, nor does it seem to be very stable as the singer had to stand still during the performance. Nevertheless the choreography makes this performance have a great impact in simply burning an image of a human on our retina that we would more relate to a virtual character in your average MMORPG.

kinetic dress beautifully shows wearer's stress patterns

Kerry Jia Yi Lin has created a great wearable electronics prototype with her dress that shows the "emotional and non-emotional stress of the wearer". Not being entirely sure about what that means, this design just speaks for itself. Like all great design does.

This dress is such a splendid example of how wearable electronics can take human embodiment further, and even how it can change our entire lives and mindsets. This kind of directly interactive systems that function on the background of awareness and alter our embodiment can change the whole way in which we interact with the world, how we feel about it and how we reflect on things. They take us back to a mindset where we are fully connected to the things around us, where we come to intuitively come to understand that every of our actions, even every of our thoughts, is as relevant as any other, and has a continuous effect on our world. They rephysicalize us as a kind of hybrid animals in an artificial lifeworld, that will be richer and more beautiful that anyone could have ever dreamt of. This dress truly is a new organ of our body, and that I think is a beautiful idea to keep in mind while developing products.



I hope that Jia Yi will make another movie of her work, one that just shows the dress being worn in relevant contexts, without any further explanation. Show us what the dress can do, and moreover, emphasize its aesthetics of movement. Let it be of highly professional quality, ready to go into the media, and simply let it sell the dress, nothing else. 30 Seconds is enough for an impactful little clip. I will post it here too, of course.