Sep 102011
 

Welcome to Fashioning Circuits, a scholarly archive of materials related to Fashion and Emerging Media.

Photo “electronic led light dress at the museum of science and industry in chicago” by Flickr user David Hilowitz

Fashioning Circuits was launched in September 2011 as part of a series of independent studies in the graduate program in Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) at the University of Texas, Dallas. The goal of the project is to explore the ways in which fashion and emerging media intersect. Areas of intersection might include the ways in which fashion and emerging media are constantly in flux, looking forward; the fashions of emerging media, including social media and hardware; expressions of identity; wearable media; smart textiles, vernacular expression; network theories; global labor issues; gender representation, sexuality, race, class and embodiment; etc.

As the site develops, you can expect to see posts in the following categories:

  • History – historical impact of science, technology, and media on fashion.
  • Wearables – examples of wearable media, smart textiles, etc.
  • Annotated Bibliography – annotated entries describing and analyzing books, articles, film, etc.
  • Emerging Media – examples and analysis of blogs, social media, etc. as they pertain to fashion.
  • Representations – representations of fashion in media, including art, media, games, social avatars, etc.
  • Identity – analysis of the impact of fashion and emerging media on identity, including raced, classed, gendered and sexualized bodies.

This is only our best guess at topic areas given the preliminary stages of the project. Our intention is to allow the categories to develop organically as we follow the paths on which our research takes us. So please stay tuned as the project develops. If you have suggestions, we would love to hear from you.

Aside from the blog archive, the editorial team is also active on Twitter. Search for the hashtag #fashioningcircuits to see all of the interesting resources we are finding and sharing.

If you are at UT Dallas and would like to join us for creative workshops, the remaining dates in the Spring 2013 semester are below. All meetings are in the ATEC 1.504 (Mobile Lab).

  • February 26 5pm – 6:30pm
  • March 19 5pm – 6:30pm
  • April 2 5pm – 6:30pm
  • April 16 5pm – 6:30pm
  • April 30 5pm – 6:30pm

 

May 142013
 

This semester in Fashioning Circuits, I was commissioned (re: required) to create a final project that exhibited the dual nature of fashion and circuits. Although I felt up to the challenge, I actually spent many weeks accidentally setting my project on fire and haphazardly learning about coding. It wasn’t all bad: I gained some new programming and sewing experience, learned a lot more about fashion and its intersections with sociology and my personal experiences, and also learned that I am capable of coming up with really cool ideas, even if they don’t exactly see the finish line.

The premise of my project was simple: visibility. I wanted to use fashion to positively steer my personal representation in public; thus, the idea of a pair of light-up “twerking” short really appealed to me. I intended (and still intend!) to wear such shorts in a party environment  where dancing was encouraged. The idea was to have the shorts light-up according to my movement: it would draw a lot of attention to me, but it would be on my terms (when dancing) and according to my comfort level. In part, the shorts would be a commentary on eating disorders and body image, being a Black woman in primarily Othering or hostile spaces, and empowerment via active and visible struggles against anti-Black misogyny.

My plan was to use an accelerometer that would take in my movement and generate it into a current that would affect a LED light, so that the light would flicker faster or slower. Having several LEDs positioned throughout the skirt would create a fashionable aesthetic that would still adhere to the “stylistic” part of the project. The circuitry would be moved by the Lilypad Arduino, a microcontroller board designed for wearables such as my project, and would serve as the brain of the operation.

Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of complications, the main one being that my Arduino seemed to be damaged. While trying to connect the circuity to my skirt using conductive tread, my Arudino would constantly lose charge, catch on fire or stop responding to my laptop. In the beginning I was able to successfully program the Arduino, but overtime–and with many re-sewings, my Arduino began to suffer many scratches and eventually began to spark and catch on fire when the current was turned on.

Another issue I had was successfully sewing the circuit together. Conductive thread requires that the wires do not touch, and I had to sketch out several placements in order to reach the right one. At one point, I’d have faulty wiring but was able to build a circuit; at another point, I had the complete opposite. Sketching helped some times, but was not able to award me with a complete circuit all of the time. My amateur relationship with conductive thread and programming also played a part in how well I was able to conduct things semester.

Despite some shortcomings, I feel that I have definitely learned a lot this year. Programming has never been my strong suit (I’m a coding kind of girl!), but learning about the Arduino software and its related code has helped me very much expand my ideas about coding. My sewing has gotten a little better too, as well as my technical knowledge and history of fashion.

In the end, I would very much like to continue the product. I do believe my intentions are still important and would love to see the project come into fruition. I know this will definitely require better knowledge of programming and the Arduino, but I am very much excited to pick up the task.

May 142013
 

Because I’m interested in the nature of online commentary, I came up with a project idea that might seem a bit absurd. After constructing this hat at the beginning of the semester and noticing that it was less-than aesthetically pleasing due to bad stitching and a loud, obnoxious print, I wondered how I could use that to my advantage.

hattho

What if I took this hat and made it react to anything negative someone said about it? To do this I’m setting up a website where users can look at a photo of my hat (see above) and make value judgments on the attractiveness level of my hat. Users can select one of two options, saying “yes, I like that hat” or “no, it’s ugly.” If the user declared my hat to be unappealing, my hat would react through the power of a post-Britney Justin Timberlake, and begin to play “Cry Me a River.” The idea is that the hat will have an instantaneous reaction to negative commentary, illuminating that what you say or do online can have consequences. (In this case, the consequence is that the hat gets sad/bumps a little JT.)

So far, I have a soundboard that I (with a lot of help!) have soldered to connect to a speaker, which in turn should connect to the Lilypad Arduino that will eventually be loaded with the right code to respond to the very important “Do you like my hat?” question.

20130513_183947

From here, I need to get the right code so that the arduino powers the soundboard to play “Cry Me a River,” and once I get that working, I will work on the code to get the arduino to respond to an email account that I will set up. When, on the website, someone condemns my hat as being unattractive, it will trigger an email to be sent to an account that I have set up exclusively for my hat. The code for the arduino will trigger for each new email my inbox gets, and then it will start playing “Cry Me a River.”

I have a bit of a ways to go before I’m finished with this project, but in the words of Galaxy Quest’s Captain Peter Quincy Taggart, “Never give up, never surrender.”

May 112013
 

In honors in Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother’s fashion. I grew up as a 90s kid surrounded by the neon flash and bold prints of clothes only children could wear; my mom, in comparison, wore very subdued, neutral clothing. Her style still remains very much the same today: a splash of color here, a higher heel there–but very much separated from other mothers. As a child, I (understandably) couldn’t comprehend why my mother didn’t look like other mothers, like the ones who picked up my friends from day care wearing brands I couldn’t pronounce. With time, I came to understand the larger factors surrounding my mother’s life that prevented her from wearing the “flossy flossy”: money was always tight, hours were long and trends eluded her. As a long time immigrant,  my mother never really paid attention to the newest and the brightest. She tolerated my (short lived) love for trends with the patient suffering of any mother, but chose  along to her personal tastes when she shopped for herself, which was once a year. Most of her clothes were functional: able to last for months on end, not susceptible to rips or tears, overwhelmingly cheap (so she could get multiples if needed) and able to allow her movement (for running after children, cooking, and cleaning.)

Functionality is a huge part of “mommy fashion,” which seems to be a growing trend for “every day moms” everywhere. I realize now that my mother was not only thinking with her wallet, she was thinking with her “motherly instincts.” What allows mothers to move, work, perform to the best of her abilities and look “fly?” Mommy fashion, at its core, takes in all of these factors; it not only asks whether functionality can work, it requires it.

Continue reading »

May 082013
 

A concept I’d been kicking around for a while is the dynamics of something like music performance and audience response. Getting a sense of what a crowd responds to or is into might influence the alteration of a set on a micro- or macroscopic level. There’s a few vectors of hardware and interaction I’d like to get at (I’ve been eyeing community drivers for the Kinect for a long time to look at crowds en masse), but when focusing more directly on wearable media I wanted to dig more deeply into movement as an expressive response to media, and ways to increase reciprocity with what inspired said movement.

Given its ability to act as a USB HID device, I went with Adafruit’s FLORA as my microcontroller.  It was my hope that this would allow me to not need a back end on any computer, and could just program the microcontroller to put out the MIDI that I wanted to express based on whatever sensory input. It wasn’t until after I’d received my FLORA and began digging for code that I noticed the complete lack of available information on any such project with that particular microcontroller. I was hard-pressed to find any example code at all of MIDI HID on the Arduino platform in general, and that which I did find seemed to be relatively inapplicable.I’d like to take the time to research and contribute to such a library for the FLORA, but that was outside of the scope of the project.

For sensory input, I’ve so far settled upon using Adafruit’s complementary FLORA accelerometer. After some flirtations with trying to get Firmata mode set up with the Node.js library Johnny-Five, my limited low-level experience made trying to interpret the i2c signals coming from the accelerometer also outside the project’s scope. I opted instead to use Adafruit’s provided library for the accelerometer and format it for easy digestion by node-serialport. At this point, the FLORA is simply kicking out accelerometer data along the three axes as a single line that the Node.js back-end interprets as a stream. This stream parses out that serial text into numeric values, which I can then scale up and interpret.

Currently the output vector for this is the coremidi module, allowing me to push interpreted accelerometer data to MIDI in OS X. I am still exploring the best ways to scale and manipulate data, and then how to have it affect music. Having the accelerometer output tied to something like the modwheel would make sense for altering the sound but not having to worry about particular notes or timing (none of the Node.js MIDI libraries I could find had clock functionality built in; quantizing would have to happen inside of whatever music software). The practically hard part of creating a motion input has been completed, but the manipulation of that input and in what was to necessarily output it is not something I’ve entirely settled upon. I will be making the source code public in the near future for the project as it exists now.

I’ve purchased and will be adhering a Sparkfun BlueSMIRF Silver Bluetooth  adapter (Adafruit has insisted a sewable module of their own is coming) to push the serial data wirelessly to a computer in order to get rid of a physical cable and to open up the possibility that there can be more than one of these devices in play at once. It would be incredibly fun to get a dancefloor full of people wired up with these sensors, and to crunch data about their physical response to music that will then influence how the music ends up getting expressed. Unfortunately, this seems very cost-ineffective at this time. Using a full-size FLORA, accelerometer, Bluetooth module and coin battery-based power supply puts material costs well above what seems practical or viable to do with any sort of scale. The cost also kept me from embedding or folding the hardware into any sort of more elaborate or particular clothing for fear of making it too specific; a wristband was as simple an item of clothing I could imagine.

As it stands, this either serves as a neat proof of concept for the dynamic I was seeking to explore, or it’s something that I as a producer of music can wear while either recording or performing that will allow another facet of control and expression that responds to my physical body. I’m still excited about this idea, but it ends up feeling less novel to me. The goal for this concept in the future will be how to play with the movement or expressions of a crowd without having to have a 1:1 relationship between micorocontrollers (or sensors) and individuals. To push in the more wearable direction, it would take cheaper parts, which maybe wouldn’t even have a dancefloor context. Perhaps much like many “quantified self” devices, it would be possible to record the rhythm of one’s daily movements, and to use those to algorithmically compose a soundtrack out of any given day.

 Posted by at 9:45 pm
May 082013
 
Presenting our projects at Capstone. Photo taken by Mona Kasra.

Presenting our projects at Capstone. Photo taken by Mona Kasra.

Coming up with an idea for the final project was a difficult task because making something that is easily wearable that also has social meaning is harder then it sounds. I went back and forth around the idea of body image and how you could some how show that with led’s on a piece of clothing but decided that it wasn’t obvious enough. I came to realization sometime a few hours before we presented Kim with our concepts that I should focus on mastectomy patients and how they may feel being uneven after having a mastectomy.

My dear friend was diagnosed with breast cancer almost 2 years ago and has been through two battles fighting breast cancer. When they found the second cancerous tumor 6 months after her first battle was supposedly “over” they decided to do a mastectomy on her left breast. For a woman to go through losing a breast and a nipple is an extremely traumatic event for her self image. I decided to focus on making the light be a simple of what or how being uneven may feel like.

After deciding that I was going to do something revolving around this concept Kim and I had many discussions as to how to best convey this. We had some very fun concepts come out of our discussions but sadly time was an issue with getting the project completed. I would have loved to do both sides of the bra and make it very apparent that one side had a nipple and one did not. Kim also mentioned making one side blow up and one side not. I also thought about doing a light that was temperature sensitive since heat is a sign of cancer as well as part of radiation. These were all fantastic ideas but timing was an issue.

Continue reading »

May 082013
 

In contemporary culture clothing has been commonly subject to the aestheticization of wealth; labels, styles and materials perform double duty as potential objet d’art as well as status symbol. Sitting alongside cars, smart devices that we perpetually have on-hand have become high-dollar evolutions of the feature phone. While older ‘dumb phones’ may have had a gradient of quality (looks, call quality, battery life), newer phones can have a number of different data connections, sensors, and proprietary software. Not only that, but brand cachet is such that even over-the-top protective cases still have cutouts for the logo to shine through. This transition is not just the mobilization or augmentation of the “digital divide” (though it certainly is that in many respects), but presses this divide further into public performance.

This performativity gets more interesting in the case of wearable computing that seems to be on the crest of entering public space, and how unevenly those devices will be distributed. As other have pointed out, this more broad (though again, not complete) spread of smartphone owners across the spectrum of socio-economic status is strongly aided by carrier subsidies that allow for the point-of-purchase cost to be comparatively minimal. Google Glass, the convenient icon for this new wave of wearable computing, has no such subsidy on it as of yet (with the hefty caveat that this is early on in the device’s life). This barrier of availability and viability is perhaps the most salient, but certainly not the only one.

Media representation so far has been unilateral in ethnocultural identity, to say the absolute least. This has been most bluntly observed by the ever-growing Tumblr of White Men Wearing Google Glass (whose potential thesis of uncoolness I’ll get back to). On this level, there is no examples of non-White/cis/male individuals using this device (which itself may already have been a byproduct of the first concern of cost). The sort of Silicon Valley early-adopter culture that would put up several thousand dollars for a wearable computer sight-unseen is not prevalent outside of certain fields and regions. When there are no examples of people who aren’t in that rigid taxonomy utilizing devices, that sends a certain sort of limiting cultural message. One article notes the minutiae of this problem of current access, and speaks more to the larger cultural circumstances around “White Men Wearing Google Glass” that are a systemic problem.

Even beyond this personal relationship with the idea of something like Glass, is the interpersonal dynamics of engaging with someone who “has” when one “has not”; signifiers of stratification become that much more persistent and that much more glaringly quantifiable. The style and branding of clothing can speak to certain levels of status, but being stared in the face by a clearly identifiable object with a well-known retail tag can create distance from those who do not have such access. Users of Glass so far have spoken of it social precariousness — in part due to the unfamiliarity to others (or oneself) of these not-glasses with a camera attached to someone’s face that listen to everything — but also due to the unreciprocated split of attention they have between anyone they engage with and their new heads-up display. There is suddenly a potential need to develop new social etiquette and expectations around mobile computing that seem like they will only germinate and develop around those used to dealing with these technologies.

It’s incredibly difficult to think of a future in which some form of wearable computer or HUD isn’t more common, but as Luke W notes, we’re maybe just not there yet. To return to part of what feels like the thought behind White Men, I’ve yet to see a picture of Glass that doesn’t look at least a little tacky. The aesthetic is not necessarily congruous with other signifiers of contemporary style. With the lenses attached, they most resemble 90s single-lens sunglasses, at this point largely relegated to certain rappers or other such tastemakers.

As uneven as the transition may have initially been into any sort of mobile device (feature phone or smart device or tablet), each has been previously more focused upon remote contact and communication. Devices like Glass explicitly focus on the here-and-now; it’s no longer someone talking to their friend but someone utilizing the tech to record the environment — that includes those in the environment. This differences makes for an odd social background which must be navigated.

 Posted by at 9:38 pm
May 082013
 

Rape, women’s rights, and abortion are always a hot topic in politics and the development of an anti-rape underwear invented by students from SRM University is a powerful statement in regards to those three hot buttons. The Society Harnessing Equipment (SHE) was developed by 2 females and 1 male from Sri Ramaswamy Memoria (SRM) University after the merciless rape of a young Indian woman in December, according to the India Times.

After research the team found that attackers often grab for the breast first which is what led them to developing the SHE camisole. When a woman gets attacked the camisole will send an electric shock to her attacker of up to 82 volts. The electric shock circuit board is positioned on the chest of the camisole and is equipped with a GPS tracking unit. When the sensors are activated the GPS and GSM unit would send out an alert to an emergency number and the woman’s parents.

The product is still in it’s early phases as they are partnering with The National Institute of Fashion to find a fabric that can be washable but the concept is out there and on it’s way to helping women. This is just one advance towards the problem of rape in our society that will possibly only protect those that are fortunate enough to purchase one. There are still many more strides that need to be taken in our society to help prevent women from being brutally raped but I’m excited to say fashion and technology is on it’s way to helping!

May 082013
 

2012 and 2013 has been an interesting time period for the development of technology into fashion, specifically with the development of Google Glass. Although, outside of the sporting good market where else have we seen advances in technological fashion to your mass markets? At a whopping expected price point of $1,500 who exactly does Google think they are marketing to?

Currently Google has a lead in the advances toward incorporating “computers” into fashionable items in the accessory market. Apple has also been rumored to be coming out with iWatch which is again in the accessory market. We have yet to see advances in the Ready To Wear market outside of the health and fitness arena. Techno Fashion by Bradley Quinn was published in 2002 and references the i-Wear project which was a production of prototype garments. This project was experimenting with making clothing that used laptops, mobile devices, and batteries which we are just now starting to see with the development of these new “smart” fashion pieces.

“Our philosophy was to integrate very naturally the technology into the clothing. The i-Wear shouldn’t hinder people’s movements, it should be like normal clothing, but with many new options. It should be a second skin that feels what is going on inside the body and outside in the environment and takes action using that data.” De Brouwer (Quinn, p. 103)

So from 2002 to 2013 we haven’t made any leaps and bounds towards the mass market having access to this kind of “i-Wear” that De Brouwer and his team were working on for a span of five years but is Google Glass about to bridge this gap? Much like the Apple fanboys Google has a strong following and they may have the brand power and hype on their side to make this technological advance stick around. While they clearly are not at a point to bring the cost to a more consumer friendly place they sure do have enough hype around their product. Currently the product is in the hands of thousands of developers and will soon be out for an “everyday” consumer to purchase…of course an everyday consumer who has $1,500 lying around to purchase on a gadget that may or may not stick around.

The question that I would like to pose is, are we at a point were people are ready to rely less on their phone and more on an item of “fashion”? Phones over the past decade have taken a place in our society as a statement of wealth and also a fashion statement. We have come a long way from the brick phones from the 80′s to the newest iPhone 5′s sleek design. So many people base their status in society on what phone they carry that are we ready to make the jump to glasses or a watch that will make a phone almost useless besides for its original purpose, to make phone calls. It can be easily seen every time Apple comes out with a new iPhone that this piece of hardware is so extremely important that people will wait for days in line just to be the first to have one. It has yet to be seen how Google will market this item to the mass public but it will be interesting to see if your average customer will want to try them on.

In an article from Mashable.com they referenced an infographic from footwear retailer Brantano that seems to be quite useful in this discussion.   

infographic from http://www.brantano.co.uk

infographic from http://www.brantano.co.uk

 

May 082013
 

Researchers in Sweden have recently come up with a new way to differentiate between designer products and knockoffs, by weaving a high-tech thread into the fabric that can be detected through a polarizing filter. The thread reveals a pattern that is only visible while being polarized, with the intention stopping the shipment of counterfeit goods.

invisiblethread

 

Counterfeit products, (or knockoffs) are high in demand in many places that are prosperous enough to desire them, because they are status symbols and signifiers of taste without the heavy price tag. Those that create the knockoffs know that they will always have a market for them (especially if they’re good knockoffs), so once they get past inspection it’s smooth sailing from there.

I didn’t really think much of this until a writer at Slate brought up why this is significant by labor standards. Actual companies can be held accountable for the labor conditions that their workers exist in, but there is not an authority or watchful public that monitors those that make knockoffs. It’s idealistic to think that major companies would abide by labor laws because they will get into trouble if they don’t, but there is that level of pressure that consumers can exert on them until they change their practices. Existing in a space where there is no monitoring public could lead to poor working conditions and abuse of workers. Having an easier way to identify counterfeit goods could, ideally, curb the creation and distribution of them,which would not only help the designer companies, but potentially shutdown illegal factories.