Ms Anne Farren (with Andrew Hutchison)
TBA
Garment, Fashion and New Technology
Imagine clothes that change colour, display changing patterns, that react to sound, light, heat, and the closeness of other people. Your heart rate, blood pressure, movement, your feelings, could cause this garment to alter its behaviour, appearance and texture. What if your clothes knew what colour to be to match your make-up? What if you could sell advertising space on your back? What if your clothes were actually alive? This paper will explore the cross over between garment, textiles and fashion design with emerging technologies of bio-technology, cybernetics, information technology, nano-technology and new media, with applications likely in fashion/everyday wear, performance art, sport, industrial/safety, entertainment and other areas not yet envisaged. The paper will anticipate the impact of new technologies in garment design, and outline possible approaches to the critical analysis of the consequences, especially the importance of the boundaries of the body and clothes/fashion as a media technology that extends the skin. The 'post-human', 'cyborg' condition is a departure point for these considerations in a study of the speed with which once new technological extensions to our biological bodies such as make-up and surgery, drugs, mobile telephones, cameras, and even 'ordinary' clothes, have become 'normalised'.
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