| Studio XX, the feminist centre for technological
exploration, creation and critique, is thrilled to invite
you to an evening with one of the stars of R&D on interactive
textiles and softcomputing: artist Joanna Berzowska.
Eggnog and treats will be served!
The field of electronic textiles has been quite fashionable
in recent years. On one end of the spectrum, there are pragmatic
applications such as military research into interactive camouflage
or textiles with nanorobots that can heal wounded soldiers.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is work being done
by artists and designers in the area of reactive clothes:
"second skins" that can adapt to the environment
and to the wearers, and that can express aspects of their
personalities, their needs and their desires, and represent
aggregate social information.
In her work, Joanna Berzowka tries to stay close to the history
and the practice of fibres and textiles. She works with traditional
textile techniques and technologies such as weaving, knitting,
sewing, embroidery, quilting etc. to create textiles that
can sense, transmit power or data, and change state. She uses
various conductive and resistive yarns as well as newly developed
dyes and inks, but constructs her own "soft hardware"
using the tools and techniques that textile makers have been
using for centuries.
In her presentation, Joanna Berzowska will present the new
technology she is developing to construct a soft, slowly animating
textile - blurring the boundaries between digital image and
textile design motif. She will also address the personal efforts/experiences/difficulties
she has come across in developing "gender-neutral"
technology curriculum teaching both programming and hardware
based art classes at university.
_Joanna Berzowka is an Assistant Professor of Design
Art and Digital Image/Sound at Concordia University in Montreal.
Her work and research deal primarily with "soft computation":
electronic textiles, responsive clothing as wearable technology,
reactive materials and squishy interfaces. She is the cofounder
of International
Fashion Machines in Boston, where she developed the
first electronic
ink wearable animated display and Electric
Plaid, an addressable colour-change textile.
She received her Masters of Science from MIT
for her work titled Computational
Expressionism. She worked with the Tangible
Media Group of the MIT Media Lab on research projects
such as the musicBottles. She directed Interface Design at
the Institute for Interactive Media at the University of Technology
in Sydney. She holds a BA in Pure Mathematics and a BFA in
Design Arts.
Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt
Design Museum in NYC, SIGGRAPH, Art Directors Club in NYC,
Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo and Ars Electronica
Center in Linz among others. She has lectured about the intersections
of art, design, technology and computation at SIGGRAPH, Banff
New Media Institute in Canada and Interaction Design Institute
Ivrea in Italy among others.
For more information about Joey please read the conversational
extracts available on the Studio's website, www.studioxx.org.
Don't miss the full lenght interview in the upcoming Cyborg
Issue of.dpi,
http://dpi.studioxx.org.
http://www.berzowska.com/
The presentations will be in both French and English.
Everyone welcome.
3$ :: free for members
Please pass on this invitation! Hope to see you there!
STUDIO XX
338 Terrasse Saint-Denis, Montréal (Québec)
H2X 1E8
Just south of Sherbrooke off St. Denis
bus 24 (Sherbrooke) or 125 (Ontario).
(514) 845-7934 / www.studioxx.org
Information: Caroline info@studioxx.org
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