I have worked with fabric and fashion design for the past 3 years and this has made me interested in what the future of textiles and clothing might hold. Already to date we have gone from all natural fabrics like cotton, wool and linen in natural colours, to synthetic fabrics with stretch, heat resistance, anti static properties, waterproof, breathable and incredibly light-weight warm fabrics. A lot of these textiles seem to be trying to reproduce or out-do nature itself.
When I consider the idea of emotion-sensing clothing
, which changes colour to suit your mood, I can’t help but compare the concept to the way the chameleon changes colour to blend in with it’s surroundings. Nature is full of lizards, frogs, birds, rodents, fish and plants, which are already doing what we are trying to do with soft technologies. Even the rat has beaten us to transmitting feelings long distance. They use sounds inaudible to the human ear to warn other rats of 
danger. This seems so similar to what the SKIN project is trying to do with collars that read biometric signals and exchange them with other individuals (emotion sensor). Even sea creatures have beaten us to changing skin colours while we’re still trying to develop tattoos that become coloured on contact between bodies.
This leads to technology becoming more than just a computer we need to turn on and press buttons for it to work. Already we are implanting microchips in our animals and the government knows what else. People are even living with machines asisting vital organs, like the pacemaker. This begs the question of how long it will be before we all have computing devices inside our bodies and what effect it will have on the evolution of our species. Is the future really going to be as it is depicted in a sci-fi film? And what freedom will we have as individuals is we all are implanted with some sort of technology, which lends itself to tracking, monitoring and being hacked. This gives rise to much debate regarding privacy. At the same time this sort of technology would be the ultimate form of cybernetics.
Through the development of soft technologies, we are in a way, trying to imitate nature, while at the same time creating our own cyber world, which we want to be completely connected to. As if machine is mans creation, in the same way as some believe nature to be God’s creation. We are still looking for ways to express ourselves, communicate and interact with our creation, the machine.
Things to look into more:
· History of textiles.
· History of soft technologies.
· History of cybernetics.
· Comparisons between animal behaviours and technological developments.
· Debate surrounding privacy and technological development.
Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality.
Randal Packer and Ken Jordan.
Publisher: New York: Norton, 2001. 1st ed.
5000 years of textiles.
Jennifer Harris.
Publisher: British Museum Press in association with The Whitworth Art Gallery and The Victoria and Albert Museum, 1993.
World textile: a concise history.
Mary Schoeser.
Publisher: London: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Devices of the soul: battling for our selves in an age of machines.
Steve Talbot.
Publisher: Sebastopol, Calif: O’Reilly Media, 2007.
Privacy in peril.
James B. Rule.
Publisher: Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. 2007.
http://www.design.philips.com/probes/projects/index.page
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/746/49597.JPG
http://www.madangdiving.org.pg/picturesindex/cuttlefishsequence/cuttlefishsequence1.jpg
http://www.smh.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1044318671749_2003/02/05/nat_pacemaker07,0.jpg
0 comments:
Post a Comment