Wearables, Week 1: Mood Board
https://www.are.na/zoe-bachman/wearables-inspo
*forgot to link to my mood board last week*
I’ve been toying around with this idea of non-verbal communication via wearables since I made the Semaphore Jacket last semester. There are many ways to send messages without speaking, from visual displays, written text, morse code, gestures…I started looking into EEG brain waves and RFID capabilities.
Part of me wants to continue working and improving the Semaphore Jacket. When I presented it at the show, a lot of people anticipated that it had the ability to transmit text messages or computer-readable messages. I talked to someone involved in wearables if it would be possible to do some kind of machine-learning to remember specific gestures and assign them a letter, so that you could spell out messages and have a computer translate them and potentially send them out over the air.
When I was throwing around ideas, I recalled my attraction to embroidery as an art form. I’ve always admired embroidered pieces and their history as a female art form. I went to Budapest a few years back and one of my favorite memories was going to the Ethnographic Museum and seeing the displays of traditional costumes. The embroidered patterns were so intricate yet consistent in certain ways. Looking into them, particular the cross-stitch, I wondered if there could be a way to correlate those patterns with binary and transform an art form into a communication method. Recently re-found an article about hungarian embroidery patterns turned into punch cards to make music!