The Screen dress by Birringer and Danjoux

5. THE PROTOTYPES
5.1 ScreenDress
ScreenDress is constructed from Chromatte, a technical light-reflecting cloth for chroma key production in TV and film. This material, designed to work dynamically with a LiteRing (a camera mounted device featuring LED’s) utilizes the retro-reflective properties of its fabrication for live effects/image replacement, fusing motion graphics with onscreen performance.

The technological garment is a real garment, the physical form of the garment, existing in the real world, and in its isolated state (uncoupled from the LiteRing), is gunmetal grey. Here the focus is on the material facts of fashion, the applied aspects and technical solutions to produce an artistic result. We are concerned with the cut and the fabrication, the detailing and finishes and the overall silhouette statement, the structure of the garment and how the body engages with the piece, i.e. how it is worn/performed and is choreographed into movement. Pleats: expanding and contracting, layers, seams and a modular approach to garment construction are used, and garment and movement are inseparable, in that one extends the other, becomes the other. The moving body has an impact on the form of the design and the form of the design has an impact on the moving body.

The iconic garment is a screen garment and virtual version of the dress. The garment, according to Barthes’ analysis of the body-garment relation, is extended as a body. He discusses this through his study of Erté’s fashion drawings and specifically the Ertéan silhouette where the woman becomes the garment, is somehow biologically fused into the woman-garment. The body can no longer be separated from its adornment and decoration. The woman and the garment become one. ScreenDress, with the morphic mandate of the motion graphics, is extended as a body, poetically shifting its surface of moving patterns and textures. It invents and substitutes, simultaneously masks and reveals, is animated, becomes alive and organic with multiple juxtapositions of image and color. The filming and “camera eye” remove us from one reality into another, one where dancers (Song, Ren), organic tissues and animation become fused into expressive visual statement: an indissociable mixture of body, garment and graphics, bleeding forms, one into the other. This is a dialogue between the natural and the artificial, brought together in an intimate relationship to create a new object or artifact, the iconic garment. The iconic garment becomes a spectacle in its own right, a mechanism for display and experience.

[Fig. 1]
Nam Eun Song with animated ScreenDress, Videostill © 2006 DAP Lab.

The process of design begins with movement, introducing partial garment structures and cloth to the initial frame. Song was invited to discuss how she felt about the Chromatte. Movement behaviours/reactions initiated by the tactile stimulus of the cloth were observed. Song found the touch of this cloth somewhat harsh and aggressive, it felt hostile to her movements and unforgiving. Slashing of the fabric was explored to ease restriction/the sensation of restriction. Cut lengths of the cloth were coiled and wrapped to produce rudimentary sleeves and other garment features. Pleats introduced a more structural dimension to the surface, enabling expansion and contraction with each affected move or gesture.

Song experiments with different movement qualities and energies to explore how the "digital sketches" – incorporating the digital graphics into her movement consciousness and proprioception – affect her ability to frame the constant flow as time-image and image-movement. A particular screen poetics has evolved, and although Song’s unconscious experience cannot be verbalized here, it is apparent that she investigates the ScreenDress as an interaction instrument, a kind of membrane between the real and the projective, between herself and her other. However, the relative stiffness of the chromate material and its dull appearance in real space gain mysterious textures and luminosities in the animated screen graphics. The fabric material thus creates a contradictory pleasure. Or, rather, the motion graphics behave in an almost contradictory manner, concealing the true nature and identity of the fabric and revealing a more organic, biological, emotional response. Control shifts from fabric to dancer, and the experience becomes visibly more visceral and sensually involved as the relationships shift in motion.

[Fig. 2]
Nam Eun Song with animated ScreenDress, Videostill © 2006 DAP Lab.

The process is taken one stage further with the integration of the motion graphics and the dancer’s intimate engagement with her own animated self, the likely interaction of control and submission. The garment becomes capable of mediating interaction and encouraging new social relationships (between online partners). ScreenDress is ornamental and expressive, a union of design and technology. Transforming patterns grow and contract, interstitial forms, pulsating rhythms move across the surface, digitally emulating the biological body, the nerves and membranes and natural flows of energy. It is a shape-shifting kinetic form, constantly morphing, moving from concave to convex, one minute the dancer is wearing herself, her own emotions, the next she is displaying a (remote) partner’s imagery, becoming interwoven and intermeshed. Positioned as progressive fashion, this is not conventional clothing, but clothing for display and experience.

interaktionslabor.de/