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Wear + Seek: Ubiquitous Wearing
Wear + Seek: Ubiquitous Wearing Premier: London Design Festival / Arcade East 2017
Museum Of London / Wearable Resistance 2018
Maastricht / Fashion Clash Festival 2018
Partners & Supporters: Fashion Space Gallery, Play Labs
Dance artists Jules Cunningham, Lucy Suggate and Hannah Burfield,
Jelena Viscovic for producing the Unity Animations for HoloLens
Hiro Yokoyama for editing parts of the video
Paul Steinmann for the sound-collages
Motion graphics by Oliver Wrobel
Katy Davies for images and videography.
Wear + Seek is an interactive and immersive game based on the principles of Hide&Seek. Upon entering, the audience is asked to wear specially designed garments and to use the various vision systems that were made available: they then went to seek for the garments responding to either of the vision systems they were endowed with. The aim of the play is to send the visitors on a quest to understand the process of ‘being watched’ and ‘being the one watching’ in a world where our bodies are more than ever read and quantified with the help of machine vision.
Two HoloLenses allowed a mixed reality experience that uses the various garments and patterns as triggers to create virtual landscapes and animations. As further extension of the game, Jules Cunningham and Hannah Burfield performed whilst being followed by a person wearing an InfraRed Camera Headset – recording their various bodily heat-pattern in contrast to those of the audience. The process of surveillance and spy-tools became a gamified and embodied process that soon led to an immersive play on enhanced vision systems and their future role in design and social interaction.
Wearable Resistance Salon
Museum of London 2018
Curated by Kat Thiel for Fashion Space Gallery, Wearable Resistance put clothes into a critical context; investigating the interface between the individual’s safety and third party interest. The evening consisted of an opening provocation by artist and musician Gaika based around his chilling fictional essay titled The Spectacular Empire’ describing a series of political events starting with civil unrest in 2018, followed by a panel discussion addressing issues around how clothes can function in an age of pervasive surveillance, strategies to protect future urban identities and sartorial responses that tread the fine line between safety and trust including Gaika, Adam Thorpe of Vexed Generation and Alexa Pollmann of Peut-Porter and a performance and our interactive experience Wear & Seek.
Research:Ubiquitous Wearing
At the start of this project, we developed three reactive textiles to reinstate the protective function of camouflage fabrics: common camouflage prints are designed to hide from human vision rather than drones and other machine vision devices. The MARPAT for example (Marine Pattern - used by US Marine Corps) is visually still based on the well known woodland pattern.
Speculating on possible future applications and ways of seeing and being seen, we dove into a series of scenarios to imagine how clothes and bodies might become billboards in a future where augmentation is ubiquious.
