"FROM SILK TO MICROCONTROLLERS"
Katherine Moriwaki interviews Joey Berzowska on designing fashion,
technology, and memory-rich garments.


KM: Fashion and technology are experiencing quite a rise of interest
lately. How would you explain the recent hype? Do you think the
applications are ready for market, and are you interested in
commercializing the projects developed at XS Labs?

JB: I think the hype (not sure how recent it is, really) is explained very
simply by the fact that in our western, techno-loving culture, we all want
to be superheroes and have superpowers. We love gadgets, we love visual
culture, and we all want to self-help and self-improve. Therefore, the
promise of magical cloaks and enhanced garments resonates very strongly
with most of us.

Being in Canada, I have the great luxury of being able to get lots of
research funding (I have received almost half a million so far) without any
military or corporate strings tied to the money. Deliverables from my
grants usually center on cultural dissemination and giving back to the
community through teaching, writing, showing work, giving interviews,
participating in conferences, and organizing workshops. I really love
Canada for the great support of art-based research that happens here.

I am definitely interested in commercializing things like my expertise,
through consulting services, and also marketing a line of very simple
dresses, focusing on good design rather than fancy technology.

At the same time, I think there are lots of applications of fashion
technology out there already, mostly the sports. The things that they do
with shoes alone are incredible!


KM: You have described your previous research titled "Computational
Expressionism" as "a model for drawing that combines higher level
algorithmic design with real-time gestural input" but later co-founded the
company International Fashion Machines with Maggie Orth. Can you share the
process by which your research interests moved from algorithmic drawing to
fashion and textiles? In other words, how did you get involved
in this area?

JB: There are two parts to this story: personal and professional. On the
personal front, I have always loved making things with fibers and textiles.
I have also always been very much a "bricoleur" with clothes and
accessories. I learned to knit and crochet when I was seven, but even then
I mostly made bizarre, experimental, unconventional things, which usually
looked terrible, but I just could never force myself to follow the
patterns. Later on, I got a tiny little weaving setup, I was also making
experimental clothes for the couple of dolls that I owned (really out of
necessity, we were living in Africa, did not have much money and so on). I
destroyed many of my own garments, trying to "improve" them. I finally
learned how to make my own textiles with stuff like Batik and I learned to
sew. I produced many wearable disasters such as pants with one red leg and
one green leg, tunics with lots of little men running all over the place,
and ripped-up dresses. I was always trying to push the limits of materials
and designs, without much fashion sense, to be perfectly honest.

On the professional end of things, I got undergraduate degrees in
Mathematics and in Design in 1995. I always loved to make things, physical
things, but somehow fell into what was then called Multimedia. I had
started a little company in Montreal called Teckel Cruel ("cruel dachshund"
in French) that made interactive CD-ROMs. After graduation, I moved to
Australia and worked in interaction research at the University of
Technology in Sydney. When I went to the MIT Media Lab in 1996, I was
mostly frustrated with the limitations of existing tools for graphical
expression, so I decided to make my own. I programmed a whole bunch of
drawing environments that responded in very personal ways to gestural
input. At the same time, I created textile-based work such as a textile
(soft) input device for color selection, but most of my research involved
programming for the "small screen". When Hiroshi Ishii (director of
Tangible Media Group) saw my work, he yelled at me for using conventional
physical interfaces (the mouse) and invited me to work with him after I
finished my thesis to develop physical interfaces and tangible media
research. I worked with the group for a year, on projects such as the Music
Bottles. It was really a fantastic experience, but I grew a little
frustrated as well, because I felt that I wanted to engage the full body in
tangible interactions with the world, instead of just using the hands. I
really wanted to work with garments and the whole body. I started talking
to Maggie (whom I knew already form the lab) about starting a company and
we decide to merge our interests in "smart textiles" and full-body
interaction design into International Fashion Machines.


KM: Your current research into "Memory Rich Clothing" utilizes visually
animated textiles to illustrate "poetic and personal" interpretations of
history and memory. Can you tell us a little more about what you hope to
gain by illustrating things such as touch and intimacy on our physical
bodies? What do we have to gain from this?

JB: What interests me more than anything is the playful aspect of
electronic textiles and reactive garments. I love the unexpected and the
bizarre. I love the stuff that challenges social boundaries and makes us
question how we relate to one another (in our increasingly wireless
culture). I think it is great to have a skirt that shows when you've been
groped (and how hard), not because you necessarily want to broadcast this
to the world, but because it is one of these embodied experiences that are
becoming less and less associated with definitions of intimacy (in a
culture of wireless connectivity). It is, in a sense, your physical "hit
counter". It is funny and it is playful.

I do not think of my pieces as product designs. I think of them, first of
all, as nerdy technology prototypes (they all solve some kind of
connectivity or materials problems), but also social commentary artefects.


KM: You have been quoted as saying: "The killer app for wearable computing
is to convey personal identity information. This is called fashion and it
is mostly visual." Firstly, could you elaborate on what you see as the
limits to sharing personal information? Secondly, what are your thoughts on
the less visible aspects of fashion design which still influence our
subjective experience? Have you explored that area?

JB: We share personal information through fashion (and accessories) all the
time: our social status, sexual availability, profession, religion and so
on. This is well known. Digital technologies and electronic textiles should
not AUTOMATE this process, but could add another layer to the experience.
This is deeply subjective. The only things that change are the materials
(from silk to microcontrollers) and the potential complexity of the
programmed experience. The subjective components remain just as complex.
When I sweat, does it mean that I am sexually aroused, that I am nervous,
or that I just ran up a flight of stairs? This reminds me that I am also
deeply suspicious of using biometric data to "express" ourselves. I think
that reactive fashion stuff will be and should be approached in the same
way that fashion is approached right now. Some things can be controlled;
some things are beyond our control. Some things look much better on a model
and make us look ridiculous. A blinking skirt will not solve all our social
problems.


KM: It seems that you are interested in not only in developing and
inventing new technologies, but also in developing applications for
existing technology. What caught my attention is your advocacy of the
"misuse (or abuse)" of existing technologies, which is a sentiment that
seems fairly popular within technology and art crowds. Could you describe
how your works manifest this subversive edge?

JB: I think a lot of this sentiment comes from the fact that so much new
technology research is really funded (and shaped by) large institutions
with specific agendas (such as the US military - which I had to deal with
in my IFM days). It's cool to "misuse". It is evidence of an inventive and
innovative spirit.

I like to use materials in unconventional ways, especially to create soft
circuits using fibers and textiles that originated from defense-based
research contracts etc… Conceptually, I also flirt with questions of
privacy and surveillance with projects such as the groping skirt.

I also think that it's important to question what is now called the "memory
industry". As I said in my paper, Memory Rich Clothing: Second Skins that
Communicate Physical Memory (to be given at Creativity & Cognition 2005 in
London), the term "memory industry" is being used to describe western
society's growing interest in various gadgets that help commit to
computerized memory all of the things that we otherwise might forget, such
as appointments, commitments, and other important life details. One of the
proclaimed goals of pervasive computing research is to develop invisible
distributed sensor networks to record various aspects our activities.
Wearable computing research is similarly concerned with questions of
memory. Brad Rhodes' Remembrance Agent, for instance, is a wearable
proactive memory aid and data system that continually reminds the wearer of
potentially relevant information based on the wearer's current physical and
virtual context.

We need to clarify the distinction between concepts of human memory versus
computer memory. Computer scientists started using the term memory to refer
to hard drives and RAM as analogous to the way that humans remember facts.
But computer memory is distinctly different from human memory insofar as it
acts more as a dumping group for data, as opposed to the rich, contextual
space that makes up human memory. Computers do not forget things in the
same way that humans forget. At the same time, a computer can store images
with great accuracy but cannot identify one image as being similar to
another, which humans can do quite easily.

Once the term "memory" became established in computer science,
computer-based definition of memory infiltrated our discussions of human
memory. The "memory industry" thus defines the concept of memory in a very
objective and impersonal way. Photos and video register memory as events in
time instead of stored experiences. Memory-rich research, on the other
hand, deals with memory as it relates to the body and the interaction
between people through the use of their bodies.

It is important to develop wearable technologies that challenge social
structures and assumptions in relation to embodied interaction (or concepts
of knowledge). These interactions have developed under specific cultural,
historical and social contexts.


KM: Working in fashion and technology requires numerous multi-disciplinary
skills. Additionally I have noticed you have a sizable list of researchers
and both graduate and undergraduate research assistants listed on your
site, as well as collaborative work with the CodeZebra project by Sara
Diamond. Describe the creative process at XS Labs. How are your ideas
developed? How do you see this relating to wearable design in general?

JB: I make sure that everybody on my team can both use a sewing machine and
an adjustable voltage regulator, despite their formal training. We have
electrical engineers, weavers, designers, and programmers. They each have
distinct roles, but the really great ideas come when the roles leak into
each other. That is my job, I create the leaks. I dig the trenches.


KM: Can you tell us what you are currently working on? Where do you see
your work moving in the next twelve months and beyond?

JB: We are currently finalizing four projects:

1. Several (highly personal) animated weavings that deal with issues of
displacement and cultural identity.
2. Two Memory Suits that deploy various modalities for recording and
displaying physical memory on the body.
3. An Animated Quilt, a 10 by 10 pixel textile display.
4. Two shape change dresses, using the shape memory alloy Nitinol (we have
spent a whole year exploring the properties of various formulations and
various ways of incorporating into a textile, such as weaving, embroidery,
stitching etc.)

I plan to spend this summer masterminding our next research direction. I am
very concerned with issues of power (in all its meanings) and environmental
issues associated with this work. I also want to seriously pursue further
research in textile-based display technologies. I basically plan to grow a
couple of research consortiums over the next two years:

1. WEARABLE POWER LAB: Alternate power sources for wearable/portable computing.

We will explore power sources such as flexible solar panels, printable
solar cells (photovoltaic cells), dielectric elastomers etc… We will
develop new methods for integrating the above technologies into textiles,
so as to enable body-worn power generation.

2. MEMORY LAB: Alternate Graphics Displays, Memory Representation and Time
Based Experience.

We will study issues of representing memory and alternate substrates for
ubiquitous graphic display. We will develop new technologies for
textile-based and body-worn displays, user scenarios for ubiquitous media
deployment, and experiments in contextualizing the human body as an
augmented surface for memory representations.


Joey Berzowska is an Assistant Professor of Design and Computation Arts in
Montreal. She works primarily with "soft computation": electronic textiles,
responsive clothing as wearable technology, reactive materials and squishy
interfaces.
<http://www.berzowska.com/>www.berzowska.com
www.xslabs.net

Katherine Moriwaki is an artist and researcher investigating
technologically augmented clothing and accessories as the active conduit
through which people create network relationships in public space. She is
currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Networks and Telecommunications Research
Group at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
<http://www.kakirine.com/>www.kakirine.com
www.personaldebris.com