Workshop 7. Dance and Wearable Computing: Cultures, Fashions and Design

 

facilitated by Michèle Danjoux, with Yvonne Watson, Thecla Schiphorst, and Erin Manning

 

'Emergent design' (M. Danjoux)

We explore new ideas for movement technology and garment design in an arts and digital research context. The 'emergent dress' project, developed at the DAP Lab in Nottingham, involves transdisciplinary intersections between fashion and live performance, interactive systems architecture, electronic textiles/wearable technologies and anthropology. The project investigates the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of an 'open', 'distributed' dress that is evolving and shareable in the generation of its design by performers and users in different sites and across time difference and cultural geographies.

Together we position garment as interactive system and communication tool and undertake collectively, new approaches to design generation, exploring synthesis through shared experience. An evolving piece, the dress emerges from a multi-media and co-experience perspective; it brings together diverse elements and looks to new ways of combining them, exploring articulation and reshaping of existing systems. We investigate flexible and open design, design that emerges or is expressed through movement, examining the relationship between the body and design and the kinetic experiences of the wearer. We explore physical and emotional states of engagement with design (cloth, garment, accessory, accoutrement) and the capabilities of design to energize the body and its movements. Questioning the influence of movement on form and form on movement and how design/garment can be co-created through performance. This work links the interests of the fashion designers with the choreographer¹s interest in developing collaborative modes of performance (online/across distance and composing and communicating live with streaming or mobile media where images act upon the physical and kinetic experience of the receiver). In the autumn of 2005 the emergent dress enters research & development with computer engineers and a projected partnership with CANESIS Ltd. (http://www.canesis.co.uk).

 

Hybridity and 'translated culture' (Yvonne Watson)

The aim of my research is to examine the 'names' and the processes of re-naming and re-voicing that have marked the course of the translated cultures and the time and spaces wjich have altered the route of this epic transporting of peoples of African descent throughout the Diaspora.

 

Thecla Schiphorst

Whisper Group: "Exhale"

 

Erin Manning

the sense lab / le labosens ... dancing the virtual

 

 

RESEARCH LIBRARY