Talents / Contest & opportunities / Asvoff9: the Worlds first Wearable Technology in Fashion Film competition
Redazione August 31, 2017 6:35 AM

The field of wearable technology has a secret history, one that kick started the field of wearable technology as we know it today. Mathematician Edward O. Thorp developed the first wearable computer in 1961 in collaboration with Claude Shannon in the form of a Eudaemonic shoe to beat the roulette wheel. Other more known histories of wearable technology include the scientific and artistic inventions of Steve Mann who not only pioneered the field of wearables for the last 43 years, but became a cyborg to test his own inventions, such as; camera vision systems to blog his daily life (life logging) which informed the infamous Google Glass and the current open source eyetap project.

The current field of Wearable technology is a diverse movement of e-textiles makers and computer aided designing fabricators primarily being pioneered by a clan of women in tech around the planet. Most of the leading edge body-centric pieces are coming out of FAB labs (fabrication laboratories), hack spaces & 3d print companies like Stratasys or Autodesk’s Pier 9 in San Francisco, where artists from around the world are invited to make the impossible possible.

Contemporary fashion technologists today push the boundaries of the very word wearables, some preferring to be called Body Architects like Behnaz Fahri or Katja Vega who invented beauty technology, a wearable’s subfield where she embeds electronics into cosmetics, inventing things like Chromoskin: which dynamically changes colors in makeup.

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Other artists working from more critical perspectives include Lucy McRae, who designs extreme experiences around the body in which to push the meaning of Wearable Tech even further. For McRae wearable technology is “somewhat an ancient concept” as she’s interested in “the slipperiness of where tech meets the body, to the point where the body becomes the technology!” (McRae 2017). Other emerging fields within wearable technology include Biological-couture invented by artist Amy Karle, who creates transformational body work she describes as bionic fashion or biomimicry induced fashion tech by Anouk Wipprecht, who also collaborated on many of Viktoria Modesta’s leading edge computer enhanced prosthetic legs for her musical fashion films and performances.

The field of Wearable Technology today is booming, there’s more interest in wearables than ever before, but something was missing for the artists and wearable technologists pioneering the field….and that was how to communicate their expressive works of wearable technology to the public, which only look interesting when they’re at work on the body, performing. For many of the aforementioned wearables artists, their pieces till now have mainly been exhibited in museums and at trade shows in vitrines or on white pedestals, like dead artefacts or collectables of the past, which was causing a great deal of frustration for viewers of the public who wanted to see the actuation and communication of the wearable technology works…… IN ACTION.

Diane Pernet (the founder and director of the festival A Shaded View on Fashion Film) and I decided it’d be natural progression for wearable technology to narratively express itself through the medium of film and so we launched the worlds first wearable technology in Fashion Film competition in 2015 and put out a call for films as part of ASVOFF9. For the 9th edition of ASVOFF, Diane invited her guests to the Hollywood of the Balkans, Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia, Bulgaria. The wearable’s competition was so popular in this first edition that we ended up having in-competition and out of competition screenings, with the winner of the wearable technology prize being awarded to Lucy McRae for her newly commissioned film “The Institute of Isolation” which is an observational documentary that contemplates whether isolation; or more broadly speaking, extreme experience, be used as a gateway to training human resilience. The film was commissioned by Ars Electronica and their EU project Bright Sparks. This new medium of wearable technology in fashion film as part of ASVOFF will continue into ASVOFF 10 in 2018, the next call for films will be made later this year via website.

Text by Alexandra Murray-Leslie (Academic Artist and Curator of Wearable Technology in film and performance, co-founder Chicks on Speed)

Award season , Contests , Fashion Film , Tech

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