23: Wearable Technology, Critical Thinking and Our Digital Future with Afroditi Psarra

““Think about what you WANT to make, and not necessarily what you can make, or how will it make profit, but what would YOU make.””

We talk to multidisciplinary artist, Afroditi Psarra (Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Washington) about her work with electronic textiles, “alienesque” aesthetics, soft circuits and the new relationships that we have to establish between our bodies and responsive technologies. Discussion topics include: collaborative practice, DIY culture, parametric, design, bio-feedback, open-source working and the uncanny.

Timestamp Outline

1:30 DxArts Fab Lab facility in Ballard
3:38 Soft Lab equipment: fabric-based circuit boards, computer-driven knitting machine, digital fabric cutters, sewing machine (more information on how to use a sewing machine here), digital embroidery machines, etc
5:38 From Athens, Greece
6:02 Soft circuits and wearable technology: a mix of electrical engineering, design, art, craft, material research
6:44 Bio-signals: heart rate, muscle movement, brain-computer interfaces
7:17 The Culture Series: collaboration with Dafni Papadopoulou, based on sci-fi space operas written by Iain M. Banks, emerged from WeMake residency in Milan
14:30 Future aesthetics? “Alienesque” aesthetics? A subtlety in embedded circuitry in textiles?
15:36 Unheimlich
16:40 On working with an architect and collaborations
19:33 Collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Liapis, in residency at Velocity Dance Center on how electronic textiles and dance could be combined
21:05 Cosmic Bitcasting: a wearable cosmic radiation detector collaboration with experimental physicist Cécile Lapoire at ETOPIA residency
23:46 DIY vs high-tech?
26:46 “Intimate technologies”
27:16 “When you think about what you want to make, and not necessarily what you can make, or how will it make profit, but what would you make. So that’s the question. So I’m interested in technology as a way to interpreting personal expression or viewpoints about the world.”
28:27 As an educator: “explore technology while being critical of its mass-production”
32:12 Art as a hands-on critique of technology
36:19 “Futurologists”
38:06 Disciplines as constructs?
38:57 Roger Malina astrophysicist, defender of “transdisciplinary ArtScience practice”
40:44 “I call myself an interdisciplinary artist, or even multidisciplinary, or cross-disciplinary...For me, this combination of disciplines is something liberating.”
45:50 A speculative DxARTS/Architecture studio: A hands-on exploration of the invisible in the built environment