E-textile Coded by Girls Hits the Red Carpet: Lupita Nyong'o's Light-Up Dress

E-textiles have been lighting up runways and red carpets for a while now, but actress Lupita Nyong'o's light-up dress was especially illuminating on Dec. 2 at a promotional event for the new Star Wars movie. The LEDs in her dress had been coded by girls from around the world using tools from Google's Made With Code initiative! Check it out in the video below!
 

@lupitanyongo dress!💫 #Force4Fashion #StarWars #LupitaNyongo #JohnBoyega #DaisyRidley

A video posted by Jacky Tang (@misterjackytang) on Dec 2, 2015 at 5:52pm PST

This is particularly exciting because not only does it involve our new favorite technology, e-textiles, but it's also drawing attention to how many women are involved in this new exciting field, how it can get girls interested in technology, and how a dress can be so much more than just a pretty garment. Nyong'o used the opportunity to have a more meaningful conversation with reporters on the red carpet, beyond the typical questions about outfits that they normally ask actresses, by drawing attention to the accomplishments of the young women who coded the dress.

It's great that Google is also taking up the e-fashion mantle as part of Made with Code, so that you too can program a light-up dress here! E-textiles are really starting to garner mainstream attention, as more and more people recognize their potential for broadening participation in technology and for improving life in general.

Making Wearable Tech Fashionable: A Techie Fashion Show at IU's Statewide IT Conference

E-textiles and wearable tech are starting to become commonplace at Indiana University! Last month IU's Statewide IT conference, an annual conference for IT professionals from across the state, hosted a Wearable Tech Fashion Show for the first time, featuring sparkling skirts, light-up shoes, and even an illuminated umbrella!



Statewide IT's Wearable Tech Fashion Show. Image source: UITS Facebook page

The event was completely independent of us educational e-textile researchers, which goes to show how far these ideas are spreading and being taken up across campus. It was a collaboration between two staff members from IU's University Information Technology Services (UITS) and a fashion design class in the Department of Apparel Merchandising and Interior Design, as part of UITS's new Wearable Technology Working Group--another site to watch for socially relevant developments in e-textiles and other wearable tech!

The UITS member who led the event was Nitocris Perez, an Emerging Technology Specialist in UITS's Applied Technologies Lab, and a friend of both our Creativity Labs in the School of Education and of IU's Center of Excellence for Women in Technology. She emphasized how innovations in wearable tech these days are cool--but do not necessarily always look like things she'd want to wear. Like us, she believes e-textiles and other wearable tech that can be easily integrated into fashionable apparel is a way to broaden participation in technology and broaden the horizons of the very nature of technology in our society.

For more, check out this article from IU's IT newsletter, and this video segment from WISH-TV 8!

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Creativity Labs: Gathering STEAM: E-textiles at South Fayette School District's STEAM Innovation Summer Institute

Creativity Labs: Gathering STEAM: E-textiles at South Fayette School District's STEAM Innovation Summer Institute:



South Fayette School District in the Pittsburgh area has been a hub for educational innovation for several years now, pioneering a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) Studio model and hosting the STEAM Innovation Summer Institute to train educators to spread these innovations to their own classrooms. The Creativity Labs has worked with them before (links) to provide professional development in e-textiles. This summer, we were happy to do so again as part of our summer service activities.

To learn more about the awesome e-textile projects pictured here, read the rest of the post below!

A brief history of yarn in video games

A charming game called Unravel stood out at E3 2015. But before that, there was the Nintendo Knitting Machine, and you've been missing out.

BY LAURA HUDSON

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that he would rather take up knitting than review video games—as though the two were mutually exclusive. Lately, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth. 

At E3 this week, Electronic Arts unveiled a lovely game called Unravel, where you play as a tiny yarn character that slowly unravels as it moves through the level. Although that sounds a little like a metaphor for the slow but inexorable march that we are all taking towards death, in Unravel this thread is a versatile tool you can be use as a climbing rope, grappling hook, trampoline, fishing line, and whatever else the game can imagine. Enjoy the earnest trailer that produced many wistful sighs and misty eyes:

There have been more than a few yarn-based video games over the last several years, from the Little Big Planet series (which stars a knit doll called Sackboy) to the recent rash of Nintendo games like Kirby's Epic Yarn and the upcoming Yoshi's Wooly World. And while this uptick in might be partly attributable to the more recent popularity of amigurumi, yarn and knitting has made their way into video games since the very beginning. Let's take a look back.

THE NINTENDO KNITTING MACHINE

This is surely one of the greatest gaming artifacts of the 1980s: a magazine advertisement for a device that would allow you to knit sweaters with your Nintendo Entertainment System. In it, Nintendo claims that video game knitting is "just one more example of the innovative thinking that keeps Nintendo on the cutting edge of video technology," noting that no other game systems—not one!—have knitting peripherals. This is indeed true. Ultimately, the Nintendo Knitting machine was sounique that it was never actually manufactured.

SUPER MARIO SWEATER

The Nintendo Knitting Machine should not be confused with I Am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater, a game designed for a Japan-only '80s console called the Famicom Disk System. It allowed players to create pixel art patterns for sweaters, although you still had to knit them by hand.

LOOM

Created by LucasFilm Games and Brian Moriarty back in 1990, Loom was one of the great works of the early adventure game era—and it revolved entirely around weaving. Rather than a text parser or a traditional inventory system, you solved puzzles by playing magical four-note tunes that weave "subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality." There's a giant and all-powerful loom at the heart of it all, and at one point it tears apart the world and everyone turns into swans and flies into space. It's weird as hell, and I love it.

More at http://boingboing.net/2015/06/16/yarn-video-games.html

Impressive Crocheted Leaf Sculptures by Susanna Bauer

by Christopher Jobsonon June 15, 2015

To truly appreciate the delicacy of Susanna Bauer‘s leaf sculptures, think of crunching a dead leaf in your hand, how it disentigrates into dust with the slightest effort. To work with dry and fragile leaves as a medium for crochet seems nearly impossible, but Baur somehow manages it with ease, turning leaves into cubes, tunnels, and geometric patterns with techniques that might be more appropriate for durability of leatherwork. She shares about her process:

There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength; literally, when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context – the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings.

Bauer has a new exhibition of work at Lemon Street Gallery in Cornwall, England through June 27th, and you explore a bit more on Facebook

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/06/impressive-crocheted-leaf-sculptures-by-susanna-bauer/

A Three-Dimensional, LED-Lit Dance Costume that Exposes the Performer — Or Hides Her

PERFECT PAIRING

CULTURE,  WOMEN'S FASHION

BY ASHLEY HOFFMAN

 JUNE 5, 2015 2:30 PMJune 5, 2015 2:30 pm

Photo

The dancer Emily Smith demonstrates several of the many possible ways of wearing the artist Elizabeth Tolson's performance-art dress. Smith will perform a work titled "In the Presence of Myself" that incorporates the dress tonight at a show in Bushwick.Credit Michael Kosciesza

There are more than seven different ways to wear the artist Elizabeth Tolson’s new performance-art dress, which features a stunning three-dimensional, expandable LED-lit attachment. At the debut of “In the Presence of Myself,” a performance premiering this weekend at Bushwick’s Open Studios, the dancer Emily Smith will demonstrate them all. Tolson built the costume’s focal point by crafting rings with plastic boning. When Smith pushes the exoskeleton out, the viewer is forced to see how it juts out, like a tiered wedding cake; but when she pulls it back in, it collapses flat against the body. Tolson also tucked a hundred lights inside the sack dress’s silver and white sheer cotton, and the layers of fabric diffuse the battery-powered LEDs and illuminate Smith with a fuzzy white-yellow glow. “I wanted the lights to shine toward the body instead of out,” Tolson says.

Tolson and Smith, who met at Alfred University, have both since moved to New York, where they now regularly swap critiques of each other’s work; when it came time to bring her dress design to life, Tolson turned to Smith. “We have similar thoughts about making the body the centerpiece in different atmospheres, and that’s where our voices cross over,” Smith says. At the show, Smith will be changing the dress’s shape in slow motion as she navigates through the audience. “It’s instinctual,” Smith says. “We talked about how having the light on my stomach feels vulnerable, but when I move it onto my head, it’s almost like I absorb the light so I make more powerful movements.”

The piece, Tolson explains, explores self-image; though it’s certainly innovatively designed, to simply call the dress “wearable tech” doesn’t capture its expression of the inner conflict between self-acceptance and shame. “I keep thinking of it as the elephant in the room,” Tolson says. “By using the dress as an object to discuss how you become obsessed over a certain aspect of yourself that makes you self-conscious, it shows the beauty behind those imperfections.” Tolson and Smith discussed how to transform the dress into a tool for self-exposure — or as a shield, albeit one that still lets you glimpse the woman underneath in a flesh-colored bodysuit. It even stretches enough for Smith to crawl inside and cover her whole body — “like a turtle shell,” Tolson explains. “If people are staring, the dress can convey that need to hide.”

“In the Presence of Myself” takes place Friday, June 5 at 7 pm at The Loft Show, 248 McKibbin Street, Apt. K, Brooklyn, artsinbushwick.org.

FROM NYTImes

SECRETS 11: WEARABLES – INTERAKTIVE TEXTILIEN

BMBF-Projekt „MediaArt@Edu“

Eine Ausstellung des Institut für Berufspädagogik am KIT
11.06.2015 OUTER SPACE
12.06.2015 OUTER SPACE
13.06.2015 OUTER SPACE

Interaktive Textilien, auch als „Smart Textilien“ oder „Wearables“ bezeichnet, bilden eine neue Generation in Kleidung und Accessoires eingebetteter Mikrocomputer. Sie bieten viele Möglichkeiten der kreativen Auseinandersetzung mit so genannten „intelligenten“ Medien, die ihre Umgebung mit Hilfe von Sensoren wahrnehmen können. Verwendet werden z.B. leitfähiges Garn und Stoff, Sensoren, Motoren, LED und einnähbare Platinen (Arduino LilyPad - Technologie). Smart Textilien stellen eine Verknüpfung zwischen sinnlich-haptischem Material, präziser Computersteuerung und kreativem Konzept her. Neue Schnittstellen – genäht, gewebt oder gestickt – werden zwischen Körper, Bekleidung und Umgebung erlebbar. In der Ausstellung haben Sie die Möglichkeit, diese Textilien kennen zu lernen und mit den anwesenden Projektbetreuerinnen zu diskutieren.

Ausstellung
11.06: 15.00 - 20.00 Uhr (Vernissage)
12.06: 18.00 - 20.00 Uhr
13.06: 17.30 - 19.30 Uhr

Project Jacquard

Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms. Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces.

Read more here