Wearable performance

Abstract

Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. ‘Wearable performance’ briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with ‘design in motion’ and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an ‘evolving’ garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the ‘connective tissues’ and ‘wearabilities’ of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment.

Keywords:

• digital performance
• design in motion
• wearable space
• emotional design
• post-choreography
• narrative

Acknowledgements

The Design in Motion project and the Suna no Onna dance environment were directed by Johannes Birringer, with fashion design and art direction by Michèle Danjoux and performed by Katsura Isobe, Helenna Ren and Olu Taiwo; music composition and live processing by Oded Ben-Tal; sensor programming by Paul Verity Smith; digital animations by Doros Polydorou and Maria Wiener (with additional motion graphics by Jonathan Hamilton); scenography by Hsueh-Pei Wang, and lighting design by Miguel Alonso. Produced by Dans Sans Joux (http://www.danssansjoux.org). The research was supported by DAP-Lab/Brunel University Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance, Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design, Interaktionslabor Göttelborn, and the Leverhulme Trust.