Translator: Tristan Bel Reviewer: Fatima Zahra El Hafa
Why do we make things?
I guess to express, share ideas,
channel energy,
manifest, visualize connections.
We make different things depending on the skills we have,
or the ones we want to acquire in the process of making something new.
Depending on the availability of materials that we have around us
or reversely, because of the materials that we want, that we imagine,
and the ideas related to them simply do not exist.
Well, for the past few months, I have been making knots.
I take conductive threads
and I knot in-between them sensors,
resistors, micro controllers, LEDs,
and in the process I'm also experimenting
with the kind of mechanical connections that can develop
to string these together.
For years now, I have been absolutely intrigued by Quipus.
Quipus are these very interesting artifacts from the 15th century
that the Incas used as a very complex,
3 dimensional system of communication.
It was a recording device that you could wrap up
and send to someone.
You could actually feel it.
It was tactile so you can even see it in the dark.
And sometimes it was also worn,
which goes to show us that wearable technology
is not so recent.
And I'm not trying to interpret this very complex
and intriguing system of threads
into a 21st century wearable technology system.
But why am I really tying myself in knots?
Well let's go back a little bit,
not as far back as the 15th century,
but let's say about 20 years ago.
I've just completed a masters in philosophy,
and after spending so much time
reading and experiencing ideas
in a way that to me was very physical,
I had this deep desire to figure out:
how can I make ideas physical?
How can I communicate process and insight
in an embodied way?
So I decided that I wanted to make philosophy machines.
So I go back to school and I study
a bit more design and technology.
Now technology, the way we understand it today
had just started creeping
into more and more parts of our every day life,
so it's not about washing machines anymore.
And into more and more channels of communication,
so it's not just about the telephone anymore.
So I experiment a lot with interactive video,
and with micro controllers, tiny computers really.
New tools give us new possibilities of expression.
And one day, I'm at my school,
and I leaf through this book,
it's a technical book on how to program micro controllers,
and I come up with an application
about infrared
and I become absolutely fascinated with the idea
that there is this spectrum that's around us
which is invisible to us,
but through which we can communicate.
So I decided that I want to make a pair of jackets
that communicates via infrared.
So I go and make a pair of jackets
and my jackets when they meet each other
they transmit a very particular signal,
and they listen for the same.
And there is only one other pair
that's out there in the world,
and when the two meet,
when they're in front of each other,
line of sight, they start chirping.
They make the same sounds that crickets do
when they are trying to mate.
And they have little LEDs that blink
in the front and in the back,
so there is also a public acknowledgement
of this magical encounter.
What I really was interested was to see
how we can make the visible invisible,
and how we can give materiality to ideas.
In this case, explore ideas around non-verbal communications,
but also express the quest for the other, the perfect other,
as written in Plato's symposium.
It is possible to create artifacts
that delivers such narratives,
that transmit a point of view on what is valuable,
what it means to be human and connect with others?
But I also wanted to subvert
established notions of what things do,
and in the process, question, and maybe even alter,
the relationship we have with technology.
So, what did I do?
Well, I made another pair of jackets.
And this time, this pair of jackets lit up
when two people meet,
actually it really just lights up.
Actually when two people hug.
You know when you get a good hug?
And it feels really warm, and you feel this energy?
Well, I wanted to show that energy.
And then I made a pair of sneakers.
But my sneakers, they were not normal sneakers.
They actually sounded like high heels when you walk.
So imagine that you're walking down the street
and you hear behind you high heels.
Inevitably you'll conjure up the image of a girl,
you'll think of someone wearing high heels.
Actually she is quite comfortable,
and she can run if she needs to.
The funny thing is that when you wear those high heels
you actually start walking as if you wore high heels,
which goes to show you how easy it is to trick our mind.
Well, what I mostly wanted to do
was to explore and understand:
do such interventions change
how we understand the space around us,
how we connect with others,
the expectations we have over material reality.
and therefore a material culture ?
And it was very important to me, as it still is,
that what I made actually worked,
that I had an idea, and that I could buck it up,
that there was an embodied physical reality
to that instant that I wanted to create.
The things that we use shape what we think,
what we want,
and in turn what we want to continue making.
It turned out that the wearable environment,
or what we still kind of tentatively call wearable technology,
was this perfect space for me to bridge
my underlying desire to explore systems of communication
and how technology affects our everyday experience,
and our human experience as embodied living human beings.
What we wear,
or that we wear anything at all,
is very much at the core of this intimate
and intricate place of what makes us human beings.
Modesty, power, control,
affiliation, comfort, and adaptability,
the ability to actually thrive in hostile environments,
humor, delight, and of course, expression.
These are the things that make us human.
Our clothes have always been about technology
which is one of the reasons I dislike using the term:
"smart fabrics"
wool, cotton, linen,
they're plenty smart from the get go.
And in this intimate space that sits on our body,
it is easy to see how technology
and the things that we wear and carry
changes how we relate to the world.
The pocket watch, another early wearable technology,
changed the relationship with time forever,
as well as notions of efficiency,
punching a card,
how late it is acceptable to show up in a meeting.
Imagine if we arranged this meeting and we all had to depend
on the clock on the Times Square,
right?
And the walkman changed
our relationship with space forever.
In fact, in 1979, critics, cultural critics, called the walkman
"a technology for this generation
that has nothing left to talk about,"
because now you can get into you little space bubble
and you can experience the world in a different way.
Not unlike in the 1930s
when the zipper started to become quite popular in clothing
and moral critics were shocked, and they felt:
"here is a sure sign of moral decay."
Because now you can take your pants off much faster.
(Laughter)
And you thought that clothes and technology
have no ideology behind them.
But what's interesting, is that,
when we think about codes and systems,
we don't necessarily think of textiles.
Even though our textiles and the clothes that we wear
are packed with codes and signifiers.
Even though, in fact, the first programmable machine
was a Jacquard loom.
And we already saw how the Incas Quipus
had binary code and algorithmic design
in the very parts of them.
As my own work evolved
and I kept weaving technology in ideas
and ideas in technology,
I realized that the very act of making,
this translational process,
of turning ideas into wearable artifacts,
led me to investigate the affordances
of the materials themselves.
A critical conversation started emerging from me
between what materials could do,
or more often could not do,
and the shape ideas could take.
Finding solutions on how to weave a conductive fabric
how to merge clothes with technology,
how to develop a new connector,
became for me this metaphor,
and it started outlining what is possible.
Finding solutions became as exciting
as trying to manifest ideas themselves.
The tools and the expression
started edging closer together.
We can after all make only the things
that our tools let us make.
And I started experiencing what I now call
the "synesthetic materiality of ideas."
All my work, the clothes,
the system that started emerging from it,
even the battery issues, the wiring, the connectors,
they became this brilliant metaphor, this open question:
what do we want to do with technology?
What does it mean to have the self quantified?
For that matter, to have a self at all?
Do we want it to be transparent so we can have control
and fix it when it's broken?
Or do want it to be seamlessly integrated
and have it run in the background?
But then, when does the background become foreground?
If technology, wearable technology,
becomes part of our everyday life,
what we wrap ourselves with
as it looks as in the process of doing,
then what kind of version of self do we want to promote?
What kind of values?
What kind of idea of being?
What kind of relationships?
How can we control the narrative of technology and relationships?
How do we make sure that we can open up a space
for humanizing technology,
where value flows in all directions, and not just to some?
How do we make sure that we take care of each other,
of our environment, and everyone who inhabits it?
What we wear, from this thin film
between ourselves and our interactions,
our intentions even,
it is our interface.
What do we want it to be like in 5, 10, 20 years from now?
We can make it be.
We have the tools now more than ever.
In fact, we are making that future now.
20 years ago,
I imagined it as playful, engaging, codified but human.
We can make the things we want to see in the world.
We can build the future that we want to wear and live in.
And we can demand it. Thank you.
(Applause)