Fashionable Technology
The Dutch designer Anouk Wipprecht engages in ‘wearable technology’. She brings fasion and technology together in an unusual way, by creating systems around the body which seems to have an intelligence of their own. Her designs react to the environment around them. She seeks to create a ‘higher connectivity between the body and clothing’. The things we were have to respond in a physical and psychological way to us. She’s says: ‘We shaped technology, and from that point on technology shaped us; it defines who we are as persons.’ The technology has to become like a second skin. ‘By placing technology on the body, it becomes an extension of ourselves while working as human-interface systems and connecting to others in ways of expression, communication or defense/protection.’ She won an award for communication/ best interaction with a dress that provides the person who wears it with a juice. These dresses has sensors, which are reacting on your body.
Clothes have multiply aims, and one of them is to protect you from the gaze of another person. In this way it’s preventing the other person to take control of you. But the clothes of Anouk Wipprecht are different. The texture responds on your body, for example on your body temperature. In this way your body become an interface to communicate with the textile, and the textile is communicating to the world. It becomes hard to lie about how you feel, because your body can’t lie. Everybody get to see something that maybe you wanted to hide.
So what we see here is a different way to communicate with the world in this more virtual age. There’s a very personal input and output. The most important thing here is the relation with your body, which is, in this case, the interface for the digital. Because it is connected to your feelings, we can talk about a very intimate way of dealing with the body. Laura Mark says that the human body is standing further en further away from us. In cases like this, where the body gets involved in a digital process, the body gets back to his old position. It all sounds very good, but also a little creepy. So if it’s up to me, I’d rather keep wearing my own clothes, without showing the rest of the world how my body feels.
Sascha
(Source: http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl)
