Digital Clothes: Active,Dynamic, and Virtual Textiles and Garments

Abstract

This article will examine the probable and possible pitfalls offered to consumers and designers by the potential of textiles and garments that are responsive, active, interactive, and aware, using technologies inherited from other craft fields such as medical sensing and information technology.

These developments present obvious, and much discussed, opportunities for the design of functional garments for applications in dangerous industries, sports, rescue, and the military. However, the effect on the already complex dynamic between garment and everyday wear has not been so well examined. Using the social effects of the uptake of other now ubiquitous technology devices such as mobile phones and the Internet as a model for social impact, this article will take a look into the possible near future to see both what is possible, but also what can go wrong with active garment fashion.

This examination of the “digital” in garment manufacture moves well beyond the current, often rather clumsy incorporation of wires, sensors, and novelty “glow in the dark” fiber optics into conventional clothes. Rather, it examines the maturing of a field in which revolutionary display technologies and bio-feedback sensing are merging with textiles to produce totally natural feeling and looking fabrics that can not only change their overall color, but can display complex patterns, as well as respond to stimuli from wearer and environment. Aspects such as the effects on personal health, social conventions, and economic costs will be considered.

The article will also consider the domain of clothing and fashion for people who inhabit “virtual” environments, interacting with other people in real time. Unlike more familiar computer games, these online environments involve extensive, long-term social interaction between participants. Unfortunately, the choice of “costume” for the visual representation of each player, currently very limited, has become a frustration for individuals, and threatens to limit the social agency and growth of these environments. The problems of designing and implementing credible and engaging fashions for virtual reality are therefore also examined.     

Text(ile)s: How to Fabric(ate) Yourself a Body without Organs

Abstract

From momentary metaphorical allusions to “unraveling,” or “stitching,” to more elaborately built philosophical models that directly employ the likenesses of folded and/or patchworked cloth, the regular repetition of fabric(ated) references—punctuated by the physical refrain of turning, cloth-like pages—in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cleverly makes the relationships between “our bodies,” which are largely understood through clothed pleats, and the matter-content-expression of “their books” exceedingly palpable.

This article aims to unpack this aspect of Deleuze and Guattari's projects and to explore the implications it has not only for our immediate experiences of “the book” and/or “the textile,” but also for the traditional plays between man, beast, and technology that have been historically related through the technology of cloth and which have served to, in part, justify the human's neatly ordered dominance in the world.

As a means of embarking on this project, the article considers Deleuze and Guattari's works alongside a cast of other figures preoccupied with various fabrics, namely the matador, various (textile) artists including Eran Schaerf, and even one's own self and wardrobe, and recasts all of these figures' texts and textiles as “text(ile)s.”     

Clothes-in-Process: Touch,Texture, Time

Contemporary research on fashion consumption has largely focused on the surface qualities of dress, comprising questions of esthetics, expression, and identity. Rather than thinking about how clothes look, this paper considers how clothes feel. Theorizing clothes as always in-process rather than stable or static, this paper uses touch as lens to explore haptic and sensuous engagements that occur across a garments prosaic biography. Informed by five vignettes from a broader ethnographic project concerning clothes use, touch is located in conversations with hands and bodies. These conversations cultivate somatosensory relations with clothes that are “in-process”, in various states of wear and repair, texture, and time. The material qualities of garments emerge as an active, tangible force that works alongside an evolving dialog of use—as clothes “wear in” or “wear out.” This paper illustrates two ways in which touch informs clothes-in-process: how bodies come to know the fabric of clothes, and how the surface qualities of clothes push back against bodies of wearers. Although mundane and instinctive, the liveliness of materials and the haptic skills that attend to the use of clothes-in-process speak to value, care, and responsibility. But somatosensory relations also encompass discomfort and anxiety, leading to accumulations of clothes as matter out of place. Paying greater attention to the somatosensory registers of the body provides insights about the material meanings of clothes as garments wear over time. In light of the social and environmental implications of clothes and clothes use, such insights are important for advancing knowledge about how wearers interact with their clothes, over time.     

Exotic Quilt Patterns and Pattern Names in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

A strong characteristic of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s was its fascination with all things “oriental,” or generally exotic. It was expressed in a multitude of areas, including furniture, fashion, movies and architecture. It was also evident in quiltmaking, an extremely popular pastime of the era, in the preponderance of patchwork patterns that had an exotic theme or name. Sometimes the designs of these patterns directly reflected their exotic names; most often they did not. The reasons for the popularity of exotic pattern names are varied. Certainly, pattern designers were capitalizing on the fashion for anything oriental. But, as this paper will propose, ladies' magazine publishers and quilt column writers also were reacting to Americans' ambivalence about Asians—their fear of the “yellow peril” mixed with their admiration for Eastern design. By naming and renaming patterns and, more importantly, by mixing oriental, “colonial,” and modern imagery and verbiage, they diluted the negative connotations of the exotic and potentially made it more palatable to the tradition-centered quiltmaking world.     

The Eloquent Sari

Abstract

As part of India's aesthetically rich and politically complex textile tradition, saris are abundantly endowed with “the social life of things” as well as participating in the language of clothes. This article considers its representation in some Indian literary works as a focus for exploring acts of political and personal resistance against hegemonic authority. The sari can serve simultaneously as a sign both of the nation and of Indian womanhood while its rich array of associations has made it a valuable focal point for a number of Indian writers, both when representing major political events and when portraying the complexities of personal relationships and family life.     

Dust to Dust: A Particular History of Khaki

Abstract

This article explores the word “khaki” in various contexts, focusing on its etymological association with dust. It is not a technical textile history, though elements of process, production, and consumption are discussed as critical to the formation of what khaki means. The article emphasizes the associative power of khaki—in production, in use, and on disposal and dispersal—from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War and in a variety of European and international contexts. Focusing on ideas of the particle and processes of fragmentation, it is a teasing out of what might be described as khaki's poetics.     

String,Space and Surface in the Photography of Vik Muniz

Abstract

This article examines three series of works by the artist Vik Muniz—Pictures of Thread, Piranesi Prisons and Pictures of Wire. These works employ a string-like material to convey pictorial space. The “string” is utilized in different ways: to create a type of landscape tapestry, as a drawing constructed through “string art” techniques, and to make sculptural drawings. The use of string provides a three-dimensional element to the work, yet this apparent three-dimensionality jars with the presentation of the work as photographs of the original drawings. This article proposes an analysis of the work as reflexive examinations of the photograph. The structure of the article follows the movement from the nomadic quality of the string in Pictures of Thread, through to the taut grid construction of Piranesi Prisons and, finally, to the tensile rigid “string” of Pictures of Wire. The first section considers Muniz's Pictures of Thread and Piranesi Prisons series in relation to pictorial space and the haptic. The second section examines Pictures of Wire as an example of trompe l'oeil and simulacra. The article concludes by considering the flatness of the photograph in relation to a Deleuzian account of surface.     

Resistance and Submission,Warp and Weft: Unraveling the Life of Ethel Mairet

Abstract

This paper attempts to unravel some of the knots of handweaver Ethel Mairet's biography, and to embrace the paradoxes, political vagaries, and textures of her life. At once appropriator and colonizer, Indian nationalist and Sri Lankan scholar, twice married, twice divorced, feminist, submissive wife, communist sympathizer, businesswoman and feminized weaver, Ethel Mairet complicated virtually every trope of “feminine,” “craft,” and “colonial”—both within her life, and in attempts to write her into history. This paper examines Mairet's complicated relationships to these categories, and her negotiation of the roles prescribed for her through, in the appropriate words of artist and art historian Mireille Perron: “resistance and submission, warp and weft.”     

Freud,Fabric, Fetish

Abstract

“Frreud, Fabric, Fetish” explores the nature of the relation between women and cloth in everyday life, visual culture and psychoanalytic theory. The article proposes that the sensory connection that we all (both male and female) have to cloth cannot be adequately expressed in language. This, it is argued in psychoanalytic terms, is because the unique “language” of fabric straddles the pre-linguistic or Imaginary and the social/linguistic codes that make up the Symbolic order. Fabric is, further, shown to complicate assumptions about sexual difference because it is inevitably caught up in the persistent undecidability of the fetishistic fantasy. This uncertainty in the fabric-as-fetish becomes evident in selected examples from film and the visual arts.     

Clothing the Family of an MP in the 1690s: An Analysis of the Day Book of Edward Clarke of Chipley,Somerset

Abstract

An analysis of the Day Book 1692–1703 of Edward Clarke of Chipley, Somerset (1650–1710), MP for Taunton, reveals evidence of his expenses on clothes for his children. He also describes where the family shopped and who did the shopping, what materials were used and what they cost, who made the clothes and whether clothes were refurbished. The article uses the correspondence of Edward and his wife Mary to show how fashion and clothes were an enduring interest and subject of discussion in both town and country.     

Rethinking Textile: The Advent of the “Smart” Fiber Surface

Abstract

The advent of the “intelligent object” has happened almost unnoticed. A new sensing, networking, and automating technology has been created with the sole purpose of vivifying “dead” objects by making them responsive to human need and emotion. This article examines the appearance of wireless technology in “smart” clothing and discusses its implications for our understanding of personhood.     

Felt/Filz—Art,Crafts and Design,edited by Katharina Thomas

Abstract

Clynes and Kline's (1995 [1960]) conception of the cyborg sees a technologically augmented human designed for the adverse conditions of space travel. Despite alterations through artificial and self-organizing biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications, the paramount piece of technology enabling human non-terrestrial flirtations was the “exogenous device” of the spacesuit.

In this instance, the incorporation of high-tech textiles and manufacturing techniques accommodates the design process to the point where the distinction between fabric, garment, and astronaut merge.

This article uses the spacesuit as an illustrative example in arguing that a particular utility value of fashion is its role as “aerial”; transmitting and receiving messages that feed into, and draw from, social and cultural archives.

This article explores the concept of to-and-fro transmission/ reception, arguing that fashion, as aerial, contributes to a highly complex meaning system, in which negotiation becomes a passive, unconscious activity.     

Electronic Textiles: Wearable Computers,Reactive Fashion,and Soft Computation

Abstract

Electronic textiles, also referred to as smart fabrics, are quite fashionable right now. Their close relationship with the field of computer wearables gives us many diverging research directions and possible definitions. On one end of the spectrum, there are pragmatic applications such as military research into interactive camouflage or textiles that can heal wounded soldiers. On the other end of the spectrum, work is being done by artists and designers in the area of reactive clothes: “second skins” that can adapt to the environment and to the individual. Fashion, health, and telecommunication industries are also pursuing the vision of clothing that can express aspects of people's personalities, needs, and desires or augment social dynamics through the use and display of aggregate social information.

In my current production-based research, I develop enabling technology for electronic textiles based upon my theoretical evaluation of the historical and cultural modalities of textiles as they relate to future computational forms. My work involves the use of conductive yarns and fibers for power delivery, communication, and networking, as well as new materials for display that use electronic ink, nitinol, and thermochromic pigments. The textiles are created using traditional textile manufacturing techniques: spinning conductive yarns, weaving, knitting, embroidering, sewing, and printing with inks.     

Webs of Wrath: Terrible Textiles from the War of Troy

Abstract

The legends of the War of Troy are among the most enduring of all the world's great tales. Besides thrilling action and striking characters, these epics and dramas record vivid details of Mediterranean life stretching back to the Bronze Age.

Like many textile researchers, I have been poring over these stories for what they reveal about cloth's place and meaning in ancient times. In this article, I will discuss references that suggest that clothing fitted into a broad spectrum of fiber technology that transcended gender, and stretched from engineering to war, economics to aesthetics. Rather than being marginalized as soft, superfluous “women's work,” textiles could have terrifying power: as weapons, as agents of torment, and as prizes so alluring as to drive greed out-of-bounds.

Among the fabric/fiber images running through the Trojan stories are deadly slings, treacherous snares and nets, and crimson carpets marking a path to murder. These, and other examples, show how richly ambiguous textiles could be in the Classical world—far more protean than the pastel tones of Penelope's patient weaving.

Each of these “webs of wrath” will be discussed in turn, and illustrated with quotes from the Greek texts, as well as black-and-white line drawings from art objects of the period.     

Digital Skin: How Developments in Digital Imaging Techniques and Culture Are Informing the Design of Futuristic Surface and Fabrication Concepts

Abstract

In the last decade, technical advances in computer graphic (CG) texture mapping and surfacing processes have influenced broader cultural spheres and commercial practices. As emerging idioms from computer graphic imaging (CGI) sectors have become synonymous with related everyday terminology, the terms “skin,” “surface,” and “texture”—common parlance in real-world scenarios and prevalent in textile spheres—have come to intersect physical and digital meaning. Recent aspects of CGI development and use provide a particular framework for this article, which goes on to observe newly emerging textile and surface designers engaged in the creative development of digital skin and associated concepts. Imbued with science fiction, future scenarios, and advances in computer imaging software and hardware capability, these practitioners are hybridizing digital and material languages and challenging conventional approaches to design and fabrication processes. Digital media tools are instrumental in facilitating these practices. As design practitioners challenge perceived notions of textile, substrate, and skin through relatively newfound digital contexts, resulting propositions include high-tech interfaces for communication, surface embellishment, and guise. Also outlined is how such digital propositions are beginning to overlap emerging real and conceptual applications in wider industry and science realms, expanding the nature of and prospect for surface design. Resulting paradigms pertain to the virtual reinvention of skin as a conceptual material interface.     

Changing the World with a Pair of Jeans: Cotton Fiber,Environmentalism and Experiential Marketing in Present-day America

Abstract

This article discusses the so-called “denim drive,” an annual event in which Americans are given the opportunity to donate their old pairs of jeans, which are processed into eco-friendly insulation and used in charity projects. It discusses the emphasis on environmental concerns that is central to the drives, as well as the concerns of the main actors behind them. It also gives detailed attention to the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of cotton fiber and the transformations and applications that allow jeans to be processed into insulation. Exploring the links between the properties and transformations of cotton fibers that form the material underpinnings of the denim drives, it shows how the immense popularity of “the American uniform” facilitates the denim drives in surprising ways, which include matter as well as meaning.     

Co-existence of GM,conventional and organic crops in developing countries: Main debates and concerns

ABSTRACT

The co-existence approach of GM crops with conventional agriculture and organic farming as a feasible agricultural farming system has recently been placed in the center of hot debates at the EU-level and become a source of anxiety in developing countries. The main promises of this approach is to ensure “food security” and “food safety” on the one hand, and to avoid the adventitious presence of GM crops in conventional and organic farming on the other, as well as to present concerns in many debates on implementing the approach in developing countries. Here, we discuss the main debates on (“what,” “why,” “who,” “where,” “which,” and “how”) applying this approach in developing countries and review the main considerations and tradeoffs in this regard. The paper concludes that a peaceful co-existence between GM, conventional, and organic farming is not easy but is still possible. The goal should be to implement rules that are well-established proportionately, efficiently and cost-effectively, using crop-case, farming system-based and should be biodiversity-focused ending up with “codes of good agricultural practice” for co-existence.     

The Fiber Game

Abstract

Fiber art in the early 1970s has received little attention from art historians, despite its evident affinities with the much-studied field of Postminimalist sculpture. The article provides an overview of this moment, describing a divergence among practitioners between several strains: designers for production (exemplified by Jack Lenor Larsen); tapestry weavers, who often worked to cartoons heroic installation artists (such as Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz); and those who wished to preserve textiles as a modestly scaled “craft.” This was a politically tinged set of distinctions that played out in the actual usage of work and display spaces. Using Ed Rossbach's 1974 article “The Fiber Game” as a focal point, the article examines the available positions of this moment. It reviews key exhibitions of the period, including “Deliberate Entanglements” (1972); and concludes by suggesting continuities with the present state of affairs in contemporary art, using the example of Anne Wilson.