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 Berzowska 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 Berzowska 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 interview in the Issue #2 of electronic review .dpi, http://dpi.studioxx.org.