Jonathon Duckworth and Catherine Truman
Embracelet
reSkin Wearable Lab, 2007

The reSkin laboratory was the first wearable technologies research and development intensive laboratory lab held in Australia for Australian artists and designers. The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) created and presented the lab as part of their annual media laboratory program. Project partners were Craft Australia and the Australian National University, School of Art and Centre for New Media Art.

The title for reSkin was accidentally snitched from the, at the time, forthcoming book re:skin by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth.¹ The book is now out so you can track it down and read a range of perspectives on skin as metaphor for physical reality and ubiquitous interface.²

The reSkin lab sought to provide alternative means for wearable technological devices replacing hard wires and buttons with soft switches and conductive thread and inks integrated into the design of garments, jewellery and objects. In the lab a range of techniques for embedding electronics and new materials into traditional craft and design artefacts were considered.

Of course wearable technology and computers have a long history. In 1997 the first IEEE International Symposium of Wearable Computing was held in Cambridge Massachusetts. Previous to this, in 1984, Steve Mann a pioneer in the field developed the Wearable Wireless Webcam and even further back, in 1966, Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon developed the first wearable computer used to predict roulette wheels. And even earlier, in 1268, Roger Bacon gives the first written account of lenses used for optical purposes.³

Recent international events prior to reSkin included the "Fleshing Out" seminar and lab hosted by Virtueel Platform in Amsterdam held over two days in November 2006 with one day dedicated to workshops on wearable technology.

ANAT has a relatively long history, from 1989, of holding laboratories, schools and residencies to introduce Australian artists to new skills and technologies. ANAT's lab previous to reSkin; Create-Space held in Melbourne over two-weeks in October 2005 focussed on locative media.

The lab was led by international artists Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki of the Disruptive Design Team of the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. Moriwaki and Brucker-Cohen were developing wearables, amongst other projects, including the joint project Umbrella.net where the everyday object of the umbrella is utilised to visually display an ad-hoc transitory network. Moriwaki's work Inside//Outside also utilised an everyday accessory, the handbag, to detect pollution levels. During Create-Space Moriwaki introduced the participants to creating soft-circuit switches made from conductive fabric and threads in an electronic circuit.

Keith Armstrong and High Tea With Mrs Woo
In Step
reSkin Wearable Lab, 2007

ReSkin developed on from Create-Space to solely focus on wearable technologies. ANAT's media labs have traditionally focused on introducing the skills associated with emerging technological based forms and practices to Australian media arts practitioners, writers and curators. reSkin aimed to extend the reach to include design and craft practitioners including jewellers, fashion designers and object makers.

Twenty Australian artists and designers were selected to work with international facilitators Joanna Berzowska and Elise Co alongside national facilitators Stephen Barrass, Susan Cohn, Alistair Riddell and Cinnamon Lee. Together the group offered knowledge ranging from complex and creative circuit design and micro-controller programming, to materials research and innovation in electronic textiles as well as careful consideration of the body as site for wearable objects from a jewellery perspective.

The main role of the facilitators during reSkin was to expose the participants to the myriad of possibilities within their expert fields and enable them to cross-fertilise and collaborate to realise their ideas.

The twenty participants came from a diverse range of backgrounds including the design fields of architecture, interiors, fashion, textiles, interaction, jewellery and objects, in addition to photomedia, computer science, performance, sound and media arts.

Being the first lab organised by ANAT to specifically involve the craft disciplines alongside new media and innovations in electronic technology; the lab was designed to provoke new ways of thinking. It aimed at generating collaborative approaches to the integration of electronic function into wearable objects and garments, with the intention of creating works that not only functioned, but took into consideration the skills and processes of the craft practitioner in order to function visually as well.

Technology, which refers to computational functions and devices is becoming more closely associated with mobility, portability, convenience and therefore wearability, revealed for instance by the complex array of applications a once simple mobile phone now offers, as it is delivered in increasingly compact packages. The relationship that clothing and jewellery already have with the body exists naturally as a nexus for ways to approach the successful integration of technological operations into successful wearables.

Sean O'Connell
Singing Bowl
reSkin Wearable Lab, 2007

This type of integration was picked up by a number of the participants through the lab. Overall their projects spanned a fairly wide range of concepts, and the strength of their work as a group was largely due to the wealth of experience they brought as accomplished artists in their various fields. Conceptual depth in the works can also be attributed to their standing as artists who for the three-week period took on the challenge of working as technologists and in some cases inventors.

Despite the scope of ideas, the results of the participant's prototyping can be sorted into two loose categories, those that explored some kind of personal or interior experience, and those that ventured outward, dealing with a more external or performative aspect of personal experience.

Leah Heiss mentions in her paper Under the Skin, details of some of the first sub-group of works including her own, where together with Somaya Langley and Sarah Kettley, she discusses how they "in their own way, focus on intimate environments, personal understanding and mobility." ⁴ Such things as unconscious habits and levels of awareness of our own environments were expressed through subtle methods of interaction using sound, light and integrated switching in the form of conductive fabric and metal surfaces.

Works that used the body as subject as well as site included anatomical studies by Sean O'Connell, Elliat Rich, Jonathon Duckworth and Catherine Truman. Here bodily functions were the focus as participants highlighted aspects of being a living organism, from pulsing veins and breathing lungs, to motor skills and distorting inflatable body parts.

Jonathon Duckworth and Catherine Truman
Po Ashing's left arm
reSkin Wearable Lab, 2007

On a more performance-based level, the work of Danielle Wilde and Keith Armstrong illustrate the ways that technology can enhance experience on a shared level. Wilde's 'hipDisc' created a musical spectacle activated by the combination of soft fabric sensors through the gyration of the hips. Armstrong, in collaboration with fashion designers High Tea With Mrs Woo created a device enabling the transference of the sensory experience of treading the earth to be shared between two people.

Requiring perhaps only an audience of oneself, Ben Denham and Daniel Kojta both used technology with the movement of the body to create mark making devices, one using flex sensors attached to the body to track a cursor on screen, the other using electroluminescent strip to create a 'light scribe' replacing the sparkler for scribbling in darkness.

Drawing on the combination of skills from all areas to create working prototypes, the reSkin participants were encouraged to challenge ideas surrounding wearable technology in an attempt to re-define what technology could look like, rather than accepting the way it may already appear.

The title reSkin was an appropriate term for investigating these ways in which the body may be considered as a sight for locating new technology and the reSkin lab enabled exploration of technology not only on the body, but with the body and about the body. Across the twenty participants their chosen sites for investigation managed to cover the body from head to toe.

Ultimately the lab sought to address the pertinent question that Joanna Berzowska so aptly asks, "what does technology look like?" As she reminds us that "at the same time, technology is ornament and ornament is technology."⁵

Danielle Wilde
hipDisc
reSkin Wearable Lab, 2007

The intentional focus placed on including the craft disciplines of textiles and gold and silversmithing within this 'lab' environment, meant that alongside the extensive electronics theory components, participants were asked to take advantage of the knowledge and experience provided by rich craft traditions whose particular consideration of the body is so deeply entrenched. It is also within these traditions where the idea that technology may be considered as ornament itself has appeared throughout both historical and contemporary practice by the creative application of material research and technical innovation in making new works. Take for example, the jeweller's eternal task of integrating a fastening system sympathetically into a brooch.

Technology in this context can start to be considered as a fully integrated element of items worn on the body rather than an exclusive accessory. The reSkin lab has encouraged this direction in thinking and most importantly established foundations within Australia for further development in such an exciting and rapidly expanding area. The results of the lab have been described as, what facilitator Joanna Berzowska called a 'third wave' of wearable technology. In this 'third wave' the conceptual resolve and use of applicable materials technologies is married with high-end craft and design skills.

The third wave can be characterized not only by the complexity of materials used (the development of truly "composite materials" where circuits are stitched, printed, moulded into the surfaces and insides of the materials) as well as by the approach (a more individual, craft-oriented methodology) and the practitioners who engage in it (jewellers, fashion designers, sculptors, artists).⁶

The reSkin lab exposed the latest developments in this meshing of ideas and fields giving all involved the opportunity to explore the potential ways to reSkin the body.

Although the concept of 'wearable technology' or 'wearable computing' is not new, ways of approaching how to assimilate available technologies into wearable objects that carefully consider the body as a dynamic and interactive site for complex functional operations, are only now beginning to take full advantage of the potential offered by creative collaboration between expertise from different disciplines and fields, for instance, between visual artists, computer programmers, jewellers and fashion designers.

reSkin encouraged collaboration between an enormous wealth of experience held by both participants and facilitators, in the quest for considered integration of technology into wearable objects. This bringing together of such a diverse group of distinguished minds and capabilities has resulted in a fertile foundation for the future. The attention given to and value placed upon traditional craft practice in this context is especially promising as a place for further development.

Most importantly, reSkin provided the stage for like-minded people from all over to meet, think, share and create. From soft switches to stitched sensors to printed circuits they mapped the body with a diversity of objects and made sure that the body as a site for technology was pulled apart, analysed and reSkinned.

Alexandra Gillespie and Cinnamon Lee
11 July 2007

Alexandra Gillespie is a media artist who is concerned with integrating diverse media forms into spatial and responsive environments. She was the project manager for the reSkin lab, a participant in Create-Space and is currently a PhD Candidate, School of Art, ANU.

Cinnamon Lee is a Canberra based metalsmith and lecturer in the Gold and Silversmithing Workshop at the School of Art, ANU, where she is currently a Master of Philosophy Candidate. Cinnamon was one of the facilitators during the reSkin lab and her current research deals with new technologies in artificial lighting.

Footnotes

1. Rackham, Melinda, An Admission. reSkin Blog, www.anat.org.au/reskin/index.php, entry 4 September 2006, (accessed 6 July 2007).
2. Booth, Austin and Flanagan, Mary, re:skin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
3. Rhodes, Bradley, A Brief History of Wearable Computing. MIT Wearable Computing Group, www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/timeline.html, (accessed 4 July 2007).
4. Heiss, Leah, Under the Skin. Craft Australia, /basement.craftaustralia/public.com.au/articles/20070328.php, 28 March 2007,(accessed 29 June 2007).
5. Berzowska, Joanna, Design Research for Soft Computation. XS Labs Blog, http://xslabs.blogspot.com, entry 4 February 2007, (accessed 28 June 2007).
6. Berzowska, Joanna, Closing Statement of the reSkin Lab, 4 February 2007 and email, 10 July 2007.