“Last Christmas we set up a screen made of fairy lights in the Moving Brands window.
We then invited people to send messages and drawings, via a simple web-interface, to be shown in sequence in the window. The window was captured by webcam and broadcast live to the internet.
We stored everything sent to the window in a gallery, and the full sequence has been used to create this scarf.”
Via neo-nomad.
hexagram shirt, shaking and displaying hexagram
Zazaziza team has put together a wearable randomness generator and display that, by way of a simple gestural interface, shows hexagrams from the Book of Changes (I Ching).
The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle’s dystopic universe, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.
In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.
Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.
In a way, from an absurdist point of view, characters in the book are embracing and surrendering to randomness, almost as if they were saying “Since the ultimate purpose of the universe and my own life is beyond my comprehension, I don’t see how hard, rational cold analysis is in any way a better tool for living than random pieces of wisdom fortuitously thrown at me by the cosmos.” Some of these fictional people would probably be willing to wear a Hexagram shirt.
The shirt itself is a very simple device that allows the 1960s dystopian inhabitant to obtain a hexagram that can be looked up in the Book of Changes. It also works as an active agent of randomness by publicly displaying the hexagram, thus giving onlookers an unsolicited random answer to a question that possibly hasn’t been asked yet. (Which might make some sort of sense in Philip K. Dick’s universe.)
To cast a hexagram, the wearer shakes the sleeves of the shirt (as if he was shaking coins in the traditional I Ching way), this gesture generates a series of clicking noises and random luminescent patterns that ritualistically make way for the final configuration of the hexagram (as shown in the videos.)
Most components* that make up the Hexagram shirt are really old school. Arguably someone could have gathered all the materials and built the shirt in the 1960s, it just uses some clicking-sounding relays, noisy inverters, aluminum foil and electroluminescent sheets.
See videos on the project page.
(*) Okay, the whole thing is driven by a contemporary, not-from-a-parallel-universe Wiring board. So much for the parahistorical accidental accuracy!
Photograph model: Orlando Moreno.
MIT students are always in motion, so their projects for the advanced visual design course, Give Me Shelter, featured clothes and accessories to help navigate the gaps between work and home, self-confidence and unease, and under- or over-stimulation.
Adam Kumpf, graduate student in media arts and sciences, designed EscHome, a wearable office consisting of a chair and a desk embedded in a pair of black pants. A garment that provides the comforts of work–structure, stability, solitude–amid the pressures at home, EscHome’s chair and desk are made from lightweight carbon fiber rods, aluminum joining blocks and fabric to match the pants.
Kumpf (S.B. 2005, M.Eng. 2007) deconstructed EscHome with glee. “The structural rods are hidden within small zipped pockets and situated along the femur, so they don’t interfere with walking or sitting. Unzip the pockets; position the rods; in a minute, you’re hiding in work.”
Mary Hale, graduate student in architecture and planning, took on space, gender and mobility in her plastic dropcloth and electrician-tape pantaloons, the Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass.
Hale, whose modeling session required a 15-minute bond with the Shop-Vac to inflate Body Mass, wanted to create body-wear that functioned like a book for mental escape, subverted physics (especially gravity), and enhanced mobility and personal ease.
Body Mass achieves all this, Hale said, tipping forward and back on her personal sea. “But it’s with a twist: she who dons this body gains its lightness and freedom by assuming a culturally undesirable physical proportion–a volume at least ten times greater than her actual size. It’s a means of mental escape and an envelope of new personal space,” Hale said.
For Angela Chang, graduate student in media arts and sciences, the ripple of silk, the scratch of linen and the hush of polar fleece convey information about the wearer’s identity and activities. The experience of a blind friend who could only hear a circus performance inspired Chang to amplify these sounds.
She designed a garment for hiding and a garment to dramatize dancing. Her wool isolation scarf is equipped with two speakers, ambient noise circuits, conductive thread, and a microphone in the back to control the volume in relation to ambient noise. It cocoons the wearer inside a white-noise bubble–like having a therapist’s waiting room on your head.
Chang also designed and sewed a raw silk, bell-sleeved, dance-party shirt–with thanks to Regina Moeller, visiting associate professor of architecture, for the sewing instruction. “The basting stitch, pattern language, sewing machines–these were technologies I didn’t know,” said Chang.
Chang augmented the shirt’s typical rustling sound with an amplification circuit, sewing two microphones inside the sleeve-ends and two speakers near the neck. Movement broadcast through the speakers dramatizes dance-floor action for the vision-impaired.
Moeller, a German artist, author and publisher, co-taught Give Me Shelter with Ute Meta Bauer, director of the visual arts program. Moeller delighted in the interdisciplinary ferment of the body-wear class, she said.
“What I loved about this class and about MIT is that the twelve students came from different fields and they all helped each other,” said Moeller.
Thank you Ett La Benn has the answer for your Elegant Wipping design.
“This shirt collar with buttoned napkin works as a protector. The system is completed by a further napkin attached to the cuff.” Yep! Clean and elegant even when you’re eating spaghetti al sugo.
Via elit alice.
