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The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture |
Kris Fallon, Ksenia Fedorova, Jordan Carroll (University of California, Davis)
The Fabric of the Self: Through the Storyworlds of Wearable Electronic Art and Design
Novel wearable devices such as fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors have recently captured broad attention by major device makers (including Apple, Nike, and Fitbit) and consumers ranging from the extreme (the Quantified Self Movement) to the ordinary. While these devices represent the forefront of the mass-consumerization of wearable computing and promise a range of benefits, they typically define the concept of the self in a rather limited manner through a uniform set of empirical indicators. This disciplinary control model stands in stark contrast to the wide range of individual expression, sensory engagement and heterogeneous play embraced in the history of fashion and clothing. We believe a broader definition of the self is required for designing wearable devices capable of capturing the vast spectrum of human identity and experience. What dimensions of ourselves do we truly wish to track and optimize? How might future wearables enable us to know ourselves deeper, as well as come to terms with our fears, anxieties and obsessions? What suppressed truths can they help to reveal and remind us of?
The realities that are generated through the analysis and representation of the collected data oscillate between statistics and narrative. A typical story of a contemporary techno-bio-citizen, a story of self-improvement through taking a proactive stance and producing measurable change, may be challenged by other stories that can both integrate the data and go against them (to the extent of ridiculing the whole procedure). This paper will discuss the examples of wearable art and design that expand the conceptual dimensions of the kinds of experiences and knowledge received via the analysis of biometric data - including intersubjective feedback. Examples are works like "Improvised Empathetic Device" by Matthew Kenyon and Doug Easterly or "Tools for Improved Social Interacting" by Lauren McCarthy that serve as connectors with the immediate or remote others, providing painful physical feedback on war-related deaths or simply on your interlocutor's reactions in a form of painful or uncomfortable input. Particular focus will be given to a series of prototypes that materially test the rhetorical dilemmas and imaginative scenarios around 'critical wearables'. These pieces of clothing and accessories incorporating smart textiles and electronics explore alternative narrative strategies of engagement with measured data and revealing both what is counted and what really counts; what is sensed and what makes sense.
Biographies:
Kris Fallon is the Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Culture at UC Davis. He is a film and digital media scholar whose research focuses on non-fiction visual culture across a range of platforms. He received his Ph.D at UC Berkeley and worked for the Berkeley Center for New Media. He has published in Film Quarterly and Screen and is currently working on a book entitled Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Film After 9/11.Ksenia Fedorova is a media art researcher and curator. She holds Ph.D in Philosophy (Russia) and is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies, University of California Davis. She is the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (2014, in Russian), has been an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the National Center for Contemporary Arts, Ekaterinburg (Russia) and participated in the Jury of Prix Ars Electronica 2012.
Jordan S. Carroll is a PhD candidate in English at University of California, Davis. He is currently completing his dissertation on obscenity law and the history of the publishing industry after 1950. His work has appeared in American Literature and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.