Update as of January 11th: The talk has been moved to room 7514, on the 5th floor.

Some information about the Toronto Wearables meetup:

The Toronto Wearables Meetup is a gathering of people interested in wearable technology, fashion, wearable electronics, soft circuits, electronic textiles, emerging materials, and other creative and innovative approaches to things that live on the body.  This Meetup is a gathering artists, fashion designers, industrial designers, textile enthusiasts, engineers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in these emerging and intersecting fields.

You can register for the talk on EventBrite.

Here is a link to the blog post on the official Toronto Wearables website.

How It Works
The skirt is turned on by a conductive velcro switch. When the velcro is fastened, the white lights on the skirt turn on. There’s a switch inside the left shoe. When you step with your left foot, it puts pressure on the switch and activates a wireless transmitter that sends a signal to the skirt to turn on red LEDs. Below is a video of the red LEDs turning on.

Artist Statement
There are several actions that typically signify anger, including clenched fists, yelling, and stomping. Ariela and Tashi’s character used the power of natural elements to defeat her enemies. The idea was that when she would stomp her feet, her wand would activate her elemental powers. As for Blake’s character, his tattered garb inspired the burned and worn aesthetic in the piece. Both of the students’ characters were superheroes ultimately fueled, to some degree, by anger. Working with the concept of stomping, I incorporated elements of the students’ work to create an outfit as dark and disparaging as anger itself.

My project will be up at the Textile Museum of Canada until the beginning of June :)

To the left is an invite for the Super Wired exhibition at the the Textile Museum of Canada. The opening reception is tomorrow night from 6-7:30pm and my piece will be on display until the beginning of June.

Last year, I was chosen to participate in a project called ‘Digital Threads’. In October 2007, I attended a workshop at the Interaccess Media Centre in Toronto about electronics and textiles. I was given a group of grade 10 high school students to work with, and I helped them to create a small electronic textile piece. The students were given an assignment to create Superheros. My project was to work from their images to create a textile-based artifact.

I didn’t snap any photos of it at the time because I was extremely rushed, but I hope to get photos of it at the museum tomorrow night. I’ll post them then, along with the artist statement I wrote up.