Urban Play: What if street-hacktivist fashion could redefine the way people play in the urban landscape? Today, street fashion, e.g. for skateboarders, is mixed with location-based augmented reality games to change the way we experience the urban landscape. We speculated about the future where fashion could redefine the way people play in the urban landscapes as a mixed reality.

Computer-Obaachan: What if mass-customizable fashion could adapt to the changing needs of the elderly? Today, we live in a rapidly aging society where every need is one-off and changing. We speculated on the future of garments that could support the changing needs of the elderly beyond physical appearance.

Information Corset: What if self-changing fashion could control our body shape to manipulate the perception of beauty? Historically, women in the Western world manipulated their body shape using garments such as corsets, crinolines, and bustles. Today, we live in a society governed by information technology. We speculated on the post-human bodies that are completely designed through informatization.

Credits

Project Members: Daijiro Mizuno, Kazuya Kawasaki, Tomo Kihara, Keisuke Shimakage, Natsumi Wada, Marika Nakada, Tomoya  Ohta, Kenta Tanaka, Ryosuke Ogata, Shoko Tamura, Kazumi Kanagawa

Film Crew: Naoto Kobayashi, Kenjiro Matsuoka, Ryota Fujinaka, Sohei Suwa, Kizuki Satoi

Hair & Makeup: Traffic

The project is supported by Project Jacquard at Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP)

About the artist

Daijiro Mizuno (JP), born in Tokyo in 1979, completed an MA and a PhD in Fashion Design at Royal College of Art. Daijiro’s research projects speculate about how design can make a positive impact on our society. Daijiro is currently working as an Associate Professor at Keio University Faculty of Environment and Information Studies while working as a freelance design researcher. Daijiro also works as a co-editor in chief of fashion design critique periodical, Vanitas.

Kazuya Kawasaki (JP), born in 1991, is a fashion designer who is trying to create a new era of “speculative fashion”. He designs fashion works that speculate about an alternative fashion industry in order to explore the possibility of fusion between fashion design and emerging technology such as biotechnology and wearable technology. Kazuya’s works have been presented at National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2017), Hong Kong Design Institute (2016, Hong Kong), Design lndaba (2016, Cape town), and AXIS gallery (Tokyo, 2015). He is working as a textile researcher at Poiesis Labs founded by Shiho Fukuhara.

Lesen Sie mehr auf: starts-prize.aec.at.

This project is presented in the framework of the STARTS Prize 2017. STARTS Prize received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732019.

DuoSkin draws from the aesthetics found in metallic jewelry-like temporary tattoos to create on-skin devices which resemble jewelry. DuoSkin devices enable users to control their mobile devices, display information, and store information on their skin while serving as a statement of personal style. We believe that in the future, on-skin electronics will no longer be black-boxed and mystified; instead, they will converge towards the user friendliness, extensibility, and aesthetics of body decorations, forming a DuoSkin integrated to the extent that it has seemingly disappeared.

Credits

MIT Media Lab in collaboration with Microsoft Research.

MIT Media Lab: Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, Andres Calvo, Chris Schmandt
Microsoft Research: Asta Roseway, Christian Holz, Paul Johns

Photo: Jimmy Day

The MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at MIT devoted to projects at the convergence of technology, multimedia, sciences, art and design.

Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft. It focuses on advancing state-of-the-art computing and solves difficult world problems through technological innovation in collaboration with academic, government, and industry researchers.

DuoSkin is a collaboration between MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Reseach. The lead researchers, respectively from MIT and Microsoft, are Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao (TW) and Asta Roseway (US).

Read more: starts-prize.aec.at.

This project is presented in the framework of the STARTS Prize 2017. STARTS Prize received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732019.

You can use quadratic magnets to reconstruct photos or create your own pixel artworks. What might a seemingly chaotic array look like from another perspective? This project is designed especially for younger children who need a playful approach to understanding artificial intelligence. Of course, there is a painting station right nearby so we can show the machines how we human beings design pictures.

Matthew Biederman (US/CA), Marko Peljhan (US/SI/LV)

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address of the 34th president of the United States. Television broadcast, January 17, 1961.

In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his presidential farewell address, whose message is extremely relevant today in the light of recent revelations of massive surveillance programs, perpetual cyber/information and kinetic wars, the reshaping of the university and research complexes and intensified resource extraction.

Eisenhower’s message serves as a point of departure for a set of systemic activities in the fields of communications security, data aggregation, analysis and display. Through the use of deep learning and cognitive radio dictionaries, the current iteration of the system is trained to recognize and classify discrete digital encoding schemes and retransmit them based on the similarity of features within the speech and the audio dataset of intercepts, collected over twenty years of tactical media investigations. Embedded within this situation is also a soft probe, disrupting, and reclaiming the localized electromagnetic signal landscape.

Eisenhower’s speech was not a dark forecast. The text is the foundation for a trajectory of works that reflect upon the conditions for the development of “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” in societal circumstances that, despite constitutional protections, do not warrant them.

Credits

The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, ENCAC, City of Ljubljana Cultural Department and the Systemics lab at UC Santa Barbara.

Special thanks to: Brian Springer, Aljosja Abrahamsberg, Samo Stopar, Leon Pavlovič

V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (NL)

The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition shows a selection of outcomes realized through the international exchange of emerging talents within the Summer Sessions network. Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations.

Each summer the partners participating in this network for talent development collaborate to offer professional production support and expert feedback to artists in the realization of a new artwork or design. Local talents from each partner’s geographic region are scouted and selected for a residency abroad, where they are offered highly productive atmospheres and specific kinds of expertise at one of the international partners in the international network. While the pop-up exhibition illustrates the kind of results that this pressure-cooker residency format results in, a live event will highlight the experiences that participants have had abroad, and the effects these experiences had on their early careers.

Credits

The projects are produced as part of the Summer Sessions Network for Talent Development in a co-production with Metamedia Association, Kitchen Budapest, Art Center Nabi, Arquivo 237 and V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media

The Physical Rhythm Machine

Philip Vermeulen (NL)

The installation is a closed system that shoots balls at up to 130 kilometers per hour to create sound patterns in extreme violence. The installation cannot only be seen as an instrument, which the artist can play live, but also as an autonomous system, which creates rhythms with the help of algorithms. It breathes the flavors of rough mechanics and the early experiments of the classical minimalist movement.

Emotion Hero

Ruben van de Ven (NL)

What does it mean to feel 48 percent surprised and 18 percent joyful? Over recent years new software has emerged that estimates what people feel based on their facial expressions. Emotion Hero is a project consisting of a game and an exhibition that encourage the visitor to investigate how faces and feelings are represented by this software. The central question is what are we looking at when we read emotion scores? Which leads one to wonder what we are looking for in these numbers.

Web Spaces

Jip de Beer (NL)

Web Spaces is an ongoing investigation into the structure of web pages. How can three-dimensional beings, like you and me, explore the virtual landscape of web pages? By rendering the building blocks of a web page in three dimensions, the architecture beneath its surface is revealed.

Origin: Sustained

Mischa Daams (NL)

Origin: Sustained is an audiovisual expedition into the abstract, organic universe that results from a feedback loop between an lcd screen and a video camera. A machine that controls the camera is composed to unfold a hypnotizing voyage of abstract patterns. This happens before the eyes of the audience, in real time. This evolutionary copy-process, where one image feeds and mutates the next, demands for continuation. So in order to sustain this loop, Daams has deployed a perception algorithm to look at and respond to the chaotic patterns that emerge. The machine as steersman is responsible for the unfolding and continuity of the light/life cycle, resulting in the film.
Origin: Sustained is commissioned by FIBER with the support of the Mondriaan Fund NL and Stroom Den Haag. The first automatic expedition ‘Origin:Cycle #1’ was realized as part of the Summer Sessions network in a co-production of Art Center Nabi and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, with support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.