my first circuit drawing - for the boxes. ?hope you like the rather fetching drawing. d

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000, by Bruce Sterling
The Viridian Movement

When Blobjects Rule the Earth, by Bruce Sterling
The Long Now Foundation

ElekTex Sensors are made by the Elksen Group.
Eleksen’s touchpads are well-known for their ease-of-use and easy integration into products that require a high-degree of flexibility and durability. While most commonly used in soft-goods products like apparel and accessory products they may be used in any application, hard or soft, to provide a sophisticated control interfaces which are thinner and more durable than mechanical switch interfaces and which are conformable around curves and bends.

Eleksen’s fabric touchpads are manufactured from Eleksen’s patented smart and interactive textile, ElekTex. Designed and developed to support particular targeted applications, Eleksen’s standard touchpad designs have been developed to reduce development time and expense for Eleksen customers.

After several hours of prototype development / modification, the initial response to the sighting was questionable till photographic authentication confirmed the sighting. Please list any subsequent sightings here.
Note: Due to the serious nature of this scientific study be aware fraudulant participation will be publicly shamed. DanK.

Everyone has taken on quite a different look from the start of the lab. As resident Feldenkrais teacher to the masses I can tell you that bodies are morphing and brains are bursting! The pace has increased (if that’s possible!) and the pressure’s on. All our fabulously poetic concepts must now be pinned down and set in concrete. The facilitators are being stretched to their limit and are more than up to the task. One of the most overwhelming impressions I’ll take away from this lab is the amazing wealth of knowledge amongst all of the “Reskinners” and their incredible generousity to share it.
Cheers, Catherine

Last night we started getting serious about collaboration. Here is a
visual metaphor.

Clem.

…they’re just three of the new technologies that we covered today during the reskin workshop.
Its now 11.05pm and I’ve just gotten home. The days seem to be accumulating energy, information and a sense of mania, as the half way point of three weeks grows closer. The last couple of hours saw six of us sitting around willing google to provide the perfect link, and cursing (in a bemused kind of way) at the uncanny way the word ‘patent’ seemed to appear in many of the promising urls.

What am I looking forward to over the next couple of weeks? Receiving some precious items in the post, putting the ‘amazing previous weeks input’ into (hopefully, an equally amazing) output and doing it with an incredably dynamic team of practitioners.

Elliat

Thanks for your thoughts Tania - this process is rich and any of us long out of art college and the (then dreaded) group crit - a rare opportunity

Paul Carter writes in his book The Lie of the Land that we need to “release the ground for movement” through our reflective tred - (start by listening) not float over it or compact it violently as is our want - He says - “Let the ground rise up to resist us, let it prove porous, spongy, rough, irregular – let it assert its native title, its right to maintain its traditional surfaces”

This is a rich metaphor, maybe, for some of our processes as we listen to this new ground and moderate our voices as we find “different, more measured, more diplomatic ways of moving about”.

Bear in mind too that this is doubly difficult in this field because technologies function as ‘mechanisms of erasure’ - through their processes of constant displacement – (There can be no creation without destruction - and much/most of that destruction remains hidden/unspoken). In that sense the more technology there is, the more forgetting must eventuate – and while we have an infinite ability to recover information we have a very limited sense of the digital desert in which it is lodged.

Im therefore also looking forward to the discussions too on “how much technology can we stomach” as per the orginal brief - itd be rich to think about that before we start - not as an after thought - that it almost always tends to be (for us all).

Cheers Keith

Susan Cohen facilitated another very interesting session this afternoon in taking our ideas thru the aesthetic /practical/technical considerations. As Susan puts it, helping us to “find the guts of the project”. It started with a play on words, the task was incredibly helpful in moving forward from describing our projects in serious of convoluted sentences to a one-word title for the piece, with a precise three or four word description. In attaching a short descriptor to each of our projects it encouraged each of us to come closer to designing the experience of the person that is going to wear the garment, so the aesthetic, practical and technical come together naturally to make the experience great, funny, weird, useful, exciting etc

The session also included the first user testing of an idea. Keith was asked to come to the session with his first incarnation of his idea – foot dressing. In a very round about description his concept is about being closer to the earth and sharing the experience of another persons steps. In trying to help Keith work out what it was that he wanted to convey thru his project, Joey used the foot-dressing example as a way of thinking more laterally about his ideas.

What does it mean to feel your footstep? In different shoes we walk in different ways, what we also walk on i.e. gravel or carpet affects how we walk, how do you distribute the weight between your feet, at what point of contact do you touch the earth? How do you isolate what it means to feel? Could it be about pressure points, the relative intensity, heat verses cold, pain or pleasure, what if it is tactile, what if it was wet?, How do you measure this? By looking at these considerations in different ways I am sure Keith is closer to communicating this feeling of feeling footsteps and where the technology may fit with the idea.

With all this in mind, the scissors, tape and paper will be out over the weekend as each of us create our first models of our ideas visually working how it starts to sit on the body, the relationship between the input, output while not forgetting how to create a fulfilling experience for the wearer.

What an exhilarating week it has been!!

Tania

Things are getting serious in the reskin lab as week one comes to a conclusion. Following the morning session of micro controller programming, Susan Cohn stirs the pot one last time before heading off and leaving the lab with lots to think about. Both participants and facilitators experienced the rigour of Cohn’s intense and provocative approach as they were compelled to evaluate their ideas from the point of view of a contemporary jeweller.

Questions were fired…and answers returned, although with some trepidation to begin with, they eventually gained momentum to keep up with the flow of Cohn’s critical evaluations. ‘Wearable’ denotes a relationship to the body…But whose body? Where on the body? How on the body? Why on the body? The relationship between body and object is an elementary dialogue that exists within contemporary jewellery practice and today reskin participants found themselves having to analyse their ideas in this context.
I look forward to Monday’s session where everyone will present the first incarnations of their projects in the form of paper models positioned on bodies. And I am confident that despite Susan’s absence from the lab over the next two weeks, her words will linger on in the thoughts of many…

Cinnamon