A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to present my “Initial Investigatory Research for Glacier-Human Communication Techniques” at the third Ignite Toronto. There was an amazing array of presentations. Be sure to check out the videos of the talks as well as fantastic photos by James Kachan. Special thanks to Michele Perras and Peter Horvath for putting together an excellent event.
Several of my students from last semester regrouped to host a show of their work from the Wearable Technology 1 class. “Technosapien” is the first of what hopefully be an annual event at OCAD. Be sure to check out the archive of their projects online!
I was fortunate enough to have work featured in the launch issue of Boulder Pavement – a new digital publication put together by the illustrious Banff Centre. Issue 01 includes photos, text, and an interview from my “Initial Investigatory Research for Glacier-Human Communications”. Though this bit of research & making is dated back to May & June of 2009, Boulder Pavement managed to beat me to the punch in getting the work online. Special thanks to Steven Ross Smith and Nick Hutcheson for making it happen! Here’s hoping I make it back up to the Columbia Icefields next summer…
This past Saturday I had the opportunity to offer a public workshop as part of the Banff Summer Arts Festival at the Banff Centre. Together, we covered the basics of electronics, sewing, and soft circuitry. We also brainstormed about possibility interfaces design especially for the human body. With some conductive fabric and deluxe StitchLits kits in hand, we sewed up a storm and came up with some pretty exiting creations! Projects included leg warmers that light up when you click your heels like Dorothy, a cowboy hat that responds to being tipped, and disco shirt that flashes when you jiggle, and a light-up t-shirt that was featured in a bicycle race that took place later that afternoon. Thanks to the fantastically creative participants and to the Banff Centre for hosting us.
Check out my interview about the workshop on CBC radio’s Wild Rose.
My recently released StitchLits LED Sewing Kit was featured yesterday on Instructables! This instruction set tells you everything you need to know about how to sew tiny LEDs into your clothes. You can gather the necessary materials from sources like Digikey, Sparkfun, and your local sewing store, but if you’d like to get everything you need in a nicely assembled kit, my StitchLits Kit is available on Etsy. It even comes in a cute little tin!
Thinking Physically Guest Stars each come bearing a unique perspective on the topics we’ll be covering in class. Their visits will range from short talks to demonstrations to in-class workshops.
From out in the world, we’ll be joined by Anne Gridley from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Jamie O’Shea of the Office for the Development of Substitute Materials, James Bigbee Garver of the Tiny Dance Film Series, and wearables artist and fashion designer Di Mainstone.
Closer to home, we’ll also be hearing from a handful of ITP alums and current faculty. Robert Faludi will shed some light on affordances. John Schimmel will talk about designing for bodies with different capabilities. Fiona Carswell will lead us in a discussion concerning body, memory, and evidence. And finally, Andrew Schneider will talk about bringing body-based devices into the performative realm.
Updates on the Guest Star schedule can be found here. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting semester!
At the moment, I’m holed away in the Canadian Rockies, at the Banff New Media Institute. I’m here as part of the faculty for Almost Perfect, a residency for artists who are creating works that utilize locative media. Here’s the blurb:
The Almost Perfect ‘Call and Response’ residency at the Banff New Media Institute is an annual, concentrated four-week experimental prototyping lab that explores the creation and context of location. Practitioners from all walks of locative and mobile media practice are encouraged to apply to the programme. We are particularly interested in practice that extends beyond the device out into the environment, be it landscape or datascape.
The massive scale of Banff National Parks Rocky Mountains and the expanse of the Great Plains to the east provide a unique opportunity to un-tether yourself from the usual coordinates of place. Geographies of time, scale and great disruption lay exposed, lending themselves to the call and response of technology and nature. This residency allows for the time and space to consider how modern pervasive technologies allow us to disconnect from our desktop cells and interact with the world in a whole new way.
Today I had the pleasure of doing studio visits (alongside my fellow Peer Advisors Kay Burns and Sophia New) with the 11 fabulous artists who are participating in the residency:
More info to follow on both their work and mine. In the meantime, check out the view I woke up to this past Sunday!
That’s right, folks – you can now have a Lilypad Xbee of your very own! They went live on Sparkfun today. Check it out:
You can order them here. Documentation and tutorials are coming soon. And if you’d like a personal introduction, check out the Wireless Wearables class that Rob Faludi and I are teaching at NYCResistor next month!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Computer Science department at the Kingston campus of the University of Rhode Island.
I gave a talk (titled “Considering the Body“) which gave an overview of physical and wearable computing as well as look at how we approach both of these areas of study at ITP. The campus is beautiful (I envy their abundance of fall foliage!) and it was a pleasure to meet everyone there. Thanks to Lutz Hamel for inviting me!