This was opening night of the 2nd Skin exhibit, a celebration of "imaginative designs in digital and analog clothing," at the Exploratorium here. And if the best and brightest in clothing embedded with technology and pure cacophony wasn't on hand tonight, I can't even imagine where else they might have been.
I didn't know quite what to expect at this event, but within minutes of walking through the door of this wonderful science museum, I was participating in one of the oddest group circles I've ever been in. Known as ok2touch, a project by MIT Media Lab members Jay Silver and Jodi Finch, this was an outfit that was the central element in a circuit that can be made up of almost anything, as long as human skin is a part of it.
The idea, explained Silver, is that the outfit--which is designed with special metallic-based conductive thread--turns people's bodies into musical instruments, along with the bodies of anyone else around who you touch.
That's why Silver organized myself and a bunch of others into a big circle and then proceeded to explain how, as long as we all held hands, our collective movements would produce music on the outfit being worn by a model who was also in the circle.
And it didn't have to be hands. We could bump foreheads and music would erupt from the outfit.
"The project is about designing more human-to-nature contact," said Silver, pointing out that it works with water, flowers and skin-on-skin, and that, for example, the circuit can go through water without any kind of danger. That's why, when I first walked up, Silver was having people run their fingers through some water on the ground, and the model's outfit was breaking out in music.
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