From rare and innovative, wearable technological devices at times embedded in a jacket, a bag or a piece of jewellery have become maybe not extremely popular, but definitely more common in the fashion industry. Yet there are researchers and designers out there who have been moving on, experimenting on other levels concerning fashion and technology.
Textile designer, illustrator and digital security trainer Kate Rose for example presented this August at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas a range of anti-surveillance garments from her Adversarial Fashion line.
The designs - for the time being the line comprises T-shirts, sweats, bomber jackets, dresses and skirts - are designed to trick surveillance cameras.
The garments available at the moment from the site are covered in prints of license plates and can confuse automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems. The latter use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to follow the car flows in the traffic and can collect thousands of plates a minute.
Digital systems can fail, though, as Rose explains in a presentation on her site: last November facial recognition systems accused for example businesswoman Dong Mingzhu, president of China's biggest air conditioning maker, of jaywalking because her face appeared in a bus advert. So Rose decided to explore the possibilities of confusing ALPR systems via fashion.Inspired by the fourth amendment in the US constitution protecting Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures", Rose came up with a print design featuring a series of licence plates with the words of the fourth amendment.
The ALPR system reading garments made with this fabric will add the junk license plates to the database and will therefore get confused.
While this is the first time the creation of adversarial images regards car trackers, the anti-ALPR print is not a new idea: three years ago Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey came up indeed with a collaborative project with interaction studio Hyphen-Labs that resulted in the production of the Hyperface prototype textile, characterised by an abstract pattern that triggered and confused facial recognition systems, providing them with false faces that distracted computer vision algorithms.
In April this year Simen Thys, Wiebe Van Ranst and Toon Goedemé, three researchers at the University of KU Leuven, Belgium, also proved that it was possible to confuse an AI system. The trick in their case consisted in holding against their body an adversarial patch (AI fooling images are known as adversarial patches) representing an image of people holding colorful umbrellas that had been altered by rotating it and adding noise.
An AI system must be trained to recognise and identify things, going through thousands of objects in a specific scene. Yet, when a system is presented with something it can not recognise, it gets confused; the researchers proved that, if one of them held the patch over their mid-section, the AI system was no longer able to detect their presence.
While there are privacy issues at stake when it comes to surveillance systems, the latter are first and foremost devices to reinforce safety, spotting for example people that may be causing trouble or preventing people from driving recklessly (license plate readers may be used in tracking cases, but they are mainly employed for enforcement purposes). Researchers coming up with projects about fooling surveillance cameras are therefore not trying to provide us with methods to hack things better, but they are uncovering a vulnerability in a system and implicitly highlighting they should be changed and improved. Rose's Adversarial Fashion is indeed designed to remind us that, if a car tracker can be fooled, it can become less effective and therefore it loses its purpose.
The MIT MediaLab announced yesterday that its researchers invented a battery-free underwater piezoelectric sensor that can transmit data by absorbing or reflecting sound waves back to a receiver and can simultaneously store energy. The sensor is an alternative to underwater communication: the latter relies on sound waves, and uses a lot of power, draining energy from ocean sensors, meaning that exploration of the oceans can be difficult; this technology can instead explore without a battery.
The sensors are made with a material that transforms pressure waves into electricity using piezoelectricity. As sound hits the sensor, pressure waves make it vibrate, and the vibration generates electricity that powers up the sensor. Electricity can also be transformed back into sound waves by the piezoelectric material (this communication technique is commonly used for RFID tags and transmits data by reflecting modulated wireless signals off a tag and back to a reader). The sensors communicate using binary, like computers - a reflected wave decodes a 1 bit and an absorbed wave decodes a 0 bit.
"Once you have a way to transmit 1s and 0s, you can send any information," states in a press release the co-author of the study Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and founding director of the Signal Kinetics Research Group. "Basically, we can communicate with underwater sensors based solely on the incoming sound signals whose energy we are harvesting."
This is the first time piezoelectric crystals were used not just to harvest energy, but also as a radio.
The sensors have been so far used to measure underwater temperature and pressure, measurements that can help researchers understanding underwater climate change and predict the rise in sea levels.
This network of interconnected sensors that send data to the surface is therefore a way to take the pulse of the ocean, explains a video by the MIT MediaLab. Yet the system could also be used in space missions (for example on the subsurface ocean on Saturn's largest moon, Titan) or to investigate the vastly unexplored oceans covering most our planet, tracking marine life over long periods.
The Piezo-Acoustic Backscatter System will be presented in Beijing, China, at the SIGCOMM conference this week, in a paper that has won the conference's "Best Paper" award. Adib's research on the sensor was inspired by the nature documentary series "Blue Planet," that highlights that, as oceans cover about 72 percent of Earth's surface, vast parts of them remain unexplored. Adib set therefore about finding a way to create battery free sensors to avoid pollution.
But how can long-term deep-sea sensing for extreme environments inspire art or fashion projects? Such news, you may argue, may be of interest to environmental scientists rather than to designers.
Well, the sensor inspires researches in marine biology and oceanography and, when we think about such fields or about the vast unexplored underwater realm, our minds immediately conjure up something ethereal, immaterial and almost impalpable, adjectives that go well with the work of Mariko Kusumoto.
Born in Kumamoto, Japan, and based in Massachusetts, the Japanese artist is first and foremost a metalsmith, but she recently started experimenting with textiles.
In the last few years she mainly developed pieces with thin gossamer fabric, creating sculptures or jewellery pieces inspired by deep sea creatures.
To set the fabric into complex geometrical shapes and configurations Kusumoto uses a heat-setting technique: the material memorises the shapes that are then employed for wearable 3D jewellery or interior design objects.
Kusumoto creates with this technique sea anemones or sea urchin-like shapes or transparent spheres that contain little fabric objects and blossoming flowers (she makes smaller versions of these pieces for her rings, brooches or bracelets).
Jean Paul Gaultier recently used some of Kusumoto's smaller pieces such as brooches to punctuate his Haute Couture S/S 2019 collection.
While it is not rare to spot Kusumoto's work in books about fibre art and wearable art, her pieces have also appeared on magazines dedicated to aquatic sports and diving, proving there is a strong connection between her inspirations and the mysteries of the vastly unexplored underwater realm. Hopefully she will experiment more along this line in future, maybe also thanks to new discoveries done by state-of-the-art sensors.
Cinema posters can be incredibly inspiring especially for artists and graphic designers looking for intriguing ideas for their works or even for advertising campaigns.
Online bidding opens this week (on 23rd August; the auction will close on 5th September), but in the meantime you can give a look at the various lots and learn more about the graphic designers and artists behind the posters.
As you may guess there's a bit of everything for all sorts of tastes: there are plenty of posters for Walt Disney films, such as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Dumbo.
There are quite a few valuable pieces in the Disney section, including a 1932 Mickey Mouse poster (starting bid: £12,000, but estimated to reach up to £20,000), and original artwork for Pinocchio (1940) and Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937). Artworks for the latter are particularly highly prized as these pieces resurfaced only recently as they were previously owned by an English lady (starting bid for one of the Snow White artworks: £2,400, but estimated to reach up to £6,000).
For musical lovers there's a red and yellow striped poster of iconic Top Hat (1935) with stylised renditions of dance partners Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (starting bid: £10,000; estimated to reach £20,000).
The offer is wide when it comes to posters from '40s and '50s films including Gilda, Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, A Matter of Life and Death and Miracle on 34th Street.
Audrey Hepburn fans can choose between Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany or My Fair Lady, while people interested in costume design can rediscover Marilyn Monroe in a sexy satin gown by Travilla in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).
There are fantasy (The Wizard of Oz), surf-themed (Big Wednesday) and Western posters (For a Few Dollars More) and there are some authentic gems in the sci-fi section (that also includes the Star Wars and Star Trek sagas), such as an Art Deco poster for Metropolis (1927) and a 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) poster designed for the film's Cinerama release (only shown in a relatively small number of cinemas that were able to screen this format; as a result this poster was printed in smaller quantities compared to the main release posters).
A camp poster for Batman's 1966 film based on the television series is an explosion of colours; graphically speaking the most beautiful posters remain the ads for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with Saul Bass's classic spiral design.
But there are interesting stories behind other posters: there is for example the Italian poster for House of Wax (1953), directed by Andre DeToth and starring Vincent Price.
A remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, this was the first colour 3D full-length film from a major American studio; the film poster on auction at Sotheby's was designed by Luigi Martinati who emphasised in it the fact that this was a 3D movie.
The most expensive item on auction is a French poster of King Kong (1933), estimated to reach £50,000, but an unusual investment would be the impressive poster for Federico Fellini's City of Women by the late comics artist and illustrator Andrea Pazienza (1956-1988), estimated to reach around £3,000.
Can't afford anything? You can still enjoy looking at some of the auction highlights at Sotheby's London-based galleries in New Bond Street (until 2nd September) or you may want to look at the various lots on Sotheby's website to keep in mind how much some of these posters are worth in case you stumble upon some of them at a second-hand market or online.
Her book, as you may have read, is a visual archive and recollection of the works she has created over several years. One of the starting point behind the book was indeed the question "Is it possible to think without words?" as Maruyama tried to give more space to the images of her artworks rather than to words.
In that post we promised to write more about Maruyama as I had the privilege of interviewing the artist for memorandom 0, and to write also the Afterword for the book.
So to keep up with that promise, here's a mini post-book publication interview that also celebrates the fact that Maruyama will be back to Japan this week to work on more installations (you can see her latest works on her Instagram page). To discover more about Sayaka Maruyama's art and practice, grab a copy of memorandom 0, you can still buy it from Konomad Editions, Idea Books or Printed Matters Inc in New York or POST, On Sundays and Daikanyama T-Site Tsutaya in Tokyo.
Where did you launch the book? Sayaka Maruyama: I did book launch at a Tokyo-based gallery, (PLACE) by method, in April. The launch was followed by an exhibition that went on for 3 weeks and that featured my drawings, paintings, photographs, collages and mixed media pieces, some of them also included in memorandum 0. The exhibition was a recreation of my random thoughts and fragmented idea that reflected the style and format of memorandom 0.
Who would you recommend your book to? Sayaka Maruyama: I would recommend my book to all sorts of people, but in particular to artists and designers. I genuinely hope they will find it inspiring.
Did you have the chance to speak to any readers and get their feedback at your launch? Sayaka Maruyama: I had some feedback from the people who came see my exhibition. They were impressed with the way I had arranged my work in the gallery space. Some people actually suggested to do a series of products with my artworks, like T-shirts or scarves. For the time being I did some experiments along this line and I think I will develop them more in future.
How do you feel now that your book is out? Sayaka Maruyama: While I feel relieved that it is finally out, I think the book is not a point of arrival, but the beginning of something. I do feel indeed that I want to move onto the next one now. I like books as a medium because I can play with the size, the layout design and types of paper. For me making a book means conveying onto the page all my visual thoughts. At the moment I'm planning the next book that will be possibly entitled memorandom 1. I'd like to turn memorandom into a sort of life long project.
Picture this: you're walking on a beach or maybe in shallow waters and you stumble upon a beautiful (though maybe a bit chipped) large shell, what do you do with it? Well, if the beach or the waters where you're walking are not located in a protected area, you can turn this piece into an accessory.
In my case I turned the large scallop shell my brother found on the beach (well, this is a change, considering that in the last few years he has found in shallow waters and on the beach all sorts of plastic debris, including a half-submerged television...) into a necklace (using leftover trimmings and bits of leather to support it...). Judging from the enthusiastic comments of the people who saw me wearing it (among them passers-by, so people unknown to me) it was a successful idea. What else do you need for the summer apart from an almost free hand-made striking accessory celebrating the sea?
Vintage fashion magazines can offer us a great way to rediscover the history of fashion, but, if you're lucky, you'll find some magazines that also included architecture and interior design features. The images in this post are taken for example from the July issue of a 1960 Italian magazine that had a long section on fashion, architecture and holidays in Capri.
The fashion shoots focused on beachwear, if you know your architecture you may guess which building the magazine featured. Some clues? Well, it was featured in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) and in Liliana Cavani's La pelle (1981) and we mentioned it here and there in previous posts. Yes, you got it, it's Villa Malaparte, built by writer Curzio Malaparte (real name Kurt Erich Suckert).
Attracted by some aspects of Fascism, Malaparte became an ideologue of the movement and, after he bought the land on Punta Massullo, he obtained the licence to build through his friendship with Galeazzo Ciano, husband of Edda, daughter of Mussolini. As the years passed Malaparte changed his ideas and, in 1933, after writing what was considered as an anti-fascist essay, he was exiled on the Island of Lipari.
He started building his villa on Capri in 1936 and the building, completed in 1940, soon became the favourite meeting place of many artists and intellectuals. Malaparte went to live there in 1943, after Mussolini's fall.
Godard in Le Mépris used the exterior of the building and its roof in particular as a dramatic yet poetic set for his characters, while Cavani mainly used the interior, with the four large windows of the main salon opening on the surrounding landscape. Vintage images regarding the interior of the villa are a bit rare.
There is one main reason: when Malaparte died in 1957 he left a will in which he stated he left the villa as a place where Chinese artists passing through Capri may have stayed, studied and worked. Malaparte matured this decision after he became an admirer of the People's Republic of China. His heirs didn't accept the contents of the will, they appealed and managed to get the villa reassigned to them.
The villa became therefore a private house and to this day it is not open to the public, which is an absolute shame as this building is considered a masterpiece of modern architecture and a very inspiring design for creatives working in different industries, fashion included (a few years ago its clean lines even inspired the Persol Capri Edition sunglasses).
A combination of rationalist architecture with some elements borrowed from Le Corbusier, the "Casamatta" (blockhouse), as Malaparte also used to call it, included twenty rooms. The images featured in this post relate to the living room with a huge fireplace with a window in the place of the fire, minimalist furniture, huge bas-relief by Pericle Fazzini and four iconic windows offering different views on the surrounding landscape; the dining area with its white and blue antique ceramic stove, the study, and one of the bedrooms.
The images were taken with a special permission granted by the court as at the time the magazine was published the legal dispute about the will hadn't been resolved yet.
Her real name was actually Irmgard Elisabeth Schulte and she was born in Grünstadt, Germany, in 1919. She didn't start her career in fashion, but she worked as a costume designer between 1941 and 1959, creating costumes for various war and post-war German films.
After 1945 she started working as fashion illustrator for Heute, the first German-language magazine published after the end of Second World War, and as a costume designer at the Kammerspiele Theatre, in Munich.
Here she founded in 1952 her fashion house, focusing on teen fashion and later on ready-to-wear. Two years later Life magazine highlighted that, while German designs weren't usually original, Bessie Becker's clothes were well-made with high quality fabrics.
As the years passed Becker managed to gain notoriety beyond the borders of Germany and built her following in Europe and the US with her beachwear, often donned in photoshoots by models such as Regina Relang and Joan Whelan. Some of her designs went into the archive of the National Museum in Nuremberg in the '60s; the designer died in 1971.
The images in this post (from the second photograph on) are taken from a Capri-inspired photoshoot for a 1960 Italian magazine: all the images featured Bessie Becker's designs, and while there is one light dress in solid red and black, her most successful garments remained the ones characterised by bright and vivid prints, such as popeline and linen tunics, kimono sleeve jackets and summer dresses with graphic patterns of flowers, fruit or abstract elements in bright colours, possibly accessorised with straw hats.
August is the height of summer and today in Italy it's Ferragosto, a public holiday that originated from Roman times when emperor Augustus designated the 1st of August as a day of rest. How to celebrate the summer in style? Well, in gold.
These images are taken from a gold inspired photoshoot from a 1960 issue of Italian magazine Annabella: the main picture shows a golden jumpsuit that, the magazine stated, was very trendy at the time in a laminated fabric or shantung, ideal when matched with gold sandals or cropped boots.
Crocheted gold tops were also a great option: Annabella suggested Maugard's sleeveless top (bottom right corner), but also encouraged readers to try their hand at making a crocheted tunic-like blouse with a three-dimensional surface inspired by beehives or a cropped thin blouse (top left corner; the swimsuit in this corner is maybe less interesting compared to the other designs). Have a golden summer!
Ideas. Memories. Emotions. Feelings. As we get older and look back upon our experiences we often find that fragmented and broken recollections form the vast puzzles of our lives.
Last year poet and photographer, artist and filmmaker, painter and illustrator Sayaka Maruyama found herself at a crossroad in her life and she decided to take a deep breath and find a way to tidy up her body of work.
Born in Niigata, Japan, Maruyama grew up in Tokyo, moved to The Netherlands with her family and as a grown up worked in London and New York, building her own archive of works, thoughts and ideas. She therefore attempted to come up with a method to catalogue and memorize her best and most powerful creations.
Recollecting wasn't easy, though: Maruyama realized that, throughout the years she had generated a vast corpus comprising many and multiple visions. The only way to take stock of her artistic practice and put some order into her personal disorder or finally grant to disorder the state of art, was reaching into her unconscious and giving an eternal and timeless form to the endless visual poetry she had created. The result of this process was a book entitled memorandom 0 that is now out on Konomad Editions.
I had the privilege of interviewing the artist for memorandom 0, and to write the Afterword for the book. It was a process that went on for a few months as both Maruyama and I do not think that everything has got to be produced quickly and following today's "insta" rhythms. So we got to know each other, a process that allowed me to discover her poetic, ethereal, enigmatic and romantic, strange and disquieting photographs, drawings, paintings, films and illustrations. I learnt to read through her colours, lines and silhouettes, in a nutshell I learnt to decode her lexicon and to speak her artistic language. I'm glad I took the journey and I'm overjoyed the book is finally out there.
We will do more posts in future on Sayaka Maruyama to discover the making of the book, her favourite artworks and inspirations and the models she often collaborates with - all of them incredibly strong women such as Melanie Gaydos. So we will try and discover Maruyama and her universe in future posts. In the meantime, you can buy the book from Konomad Editions, Idea Books or Printed Matters Inc in New York - enjoy memorandom 0!
It is only natural for tradition and modernity to contrast with each other, or is it? If you think about it, this clash is actually a false dichotomy, you may indeed argue that the former influences the other, while modernity affects and transforms traditions. So it would be more correct to state that tradition and modernity intermingle with each other.
Antique dealer and curator Dai Okumura totally agrees with this concept and, inspired by it, he worked on a unique idea with Japanese hair artist, head prop designer and wig maker Tomihiro Kono (河野富広).
Okumura is part of Tatami Antiques, an independent online marketplace for Japanese antiquities and, moving from antique objects, he created an installation with Tomihiro Kono's wigs.
"Katsura Rikyu" moved from the clash generated by 桂離宮, literally Katsura Imperial Villa, a finest example of Japanese architecture and garden design from the early-mid 17th century in Kyoto, and カツラ利休, literally "Wig + (Sen no) Rikyu", and consisted in an installation that featured Kono's wigs and selected Japanese antiques. The event took place in April this year for just three days in a Tokyo-based ruined factory.
Okumura hoped to create a contrast, but also a connection between the elegant Kyoto-based villa and the raw spaces of the factory, the traditional pieces on display and Kono's wigs hanging from the ceiling like mysterious entities, almost unidentified flying objects landing upon history.
Better known for creating hairstyles and headdresses for designer and brands as different as Jil Sander, Junya Watanabe and Aganovich, Kono reinvented himself in this installation.
Leaving behind his head props and using his wigs as art objects rather than as accessories for a fashion runway, Kono tried to establish historical connections with the objects surrounding them.
Yet there was still a typical Tomihiro Kono element here: as it happened in other exhibitions by the hair artisan, visitors could still try on his hand-crafted wigs to take indeed a different "persona" (a term that in its Latin etymology referred to a theatrical mask), becoming an entirely new character, or they could have opted for an antique Noh theatre mask, proving the possibilities between tradition and modernity are endless, you just have to train your eyes well-enough to spot them.
Can you introduce us to Tatami Antiques? Dai Okumura:t a t a m i (aka tatami, or tatami antiques) is an independent online marketplace for applied Mingei folk art, high-end antiques, or other uncategorized awesome stuff from Japan. Each item has been individually handpicked across the nation by tatami's unique dealers. We have been running for about 4 years and we also do exhibitions or art installations as side activities to promote our work off-line. I guess you could call tatami a radical clan of unique contemporary antique dealers in Japan who have the status of creators or artists rather than just ordinary stereotypical dealers.
So do you consider yourself an artist or a dealer? Dai Okumura: I guess I'm more of a curator or a dealer who makes something artistic by finding objects and making visual connections between them.
For this installation you attempted a connection between an Imperial villa in Kyoto and a dismissed factory in Tokyo - does architecture inspire your work and practice? Dai Okumura: Yes, totally. Architecture is a composite art form that has always inspired me a lot, especially the architectures of Katsura Rikyu. I have always been inspired by the refinement of such grand yet simple and beautiful places such as Kyoto's Katsura Rikyu with its Japanese style garden. It also reminds me of who I am, it is a bit like my DNA. On the other hand, I'm also attracted by what's incomplete or has an unintentional beauty, such as decayed and abandones places, like the powerful architecture of Tokyo's Katsura Rikyu, a nostalgic small iron factory from the Shōwa period. Besides, I consider even the smallest objects I may come across in my job as miniature architecture and I dream of being a 1 cm tall man so that I could be able to enjoy these pieces as if they were buildings!
What inspired this collaboration with Tomihiro Kono and how did you meet him? Dai Okumura: Tomihiro Kono unexpectedly contacted me and suggested a collaborative exhibition in Tokyo as a follow-up to the show he did last year in Paris. I was like "Why not? Let's do it!", because he is nice and his style is unique and interesting to my eyes. We got to know each other day by day, and we both realized that we have shared interests and a similar approach based on common understanding through each other's field of work, though our works are totally different. We are both professionals, but Tomi is a hairstylist and headdress expert while tatami is a group of antique dealers, so we belong to different fields. At the same time we both often break free from our fields: Tomi does it by elevating the wig to an art object, and I find that inspiring.
The installation you did in April was full of symbolims and featured quite a few masks, sculptures, statues and other assorted objects: what is the story behind the installation and which themes did you want to analyse? Dai Okumura: Tomi and I decided the basic idea in advance and we worked on the "New style of Karesansui" theme, with wigs floating in the air and antiques scattered on the ground. Then we improvised around this idea as if we were musicians in a jamming session. I think this solution was the best one considering the space - a ruined old iron factory. The latter became a new, curious, and transient, yet beautiful, Katsura Rikyu. I wanted all visitors to feel out of place and Katsura Rikyu to turn into an installation on itself and I felt that it actually worked. Through the space we created contradictions between traditions and stereotypes. The space looked punk and weird yet visually pleasant and it gave visitors a vision of Japan today, while transporting them to an undefined time from the past.
Tomihiro Kono's wigs seem to cover different times – some of them look modern and punk, others look instead as if they were created for historical characters like Marie Antoinette. In which ways his pieces spoke to the Japanese antiquities on display? Dai Okumura: Tomi's wigs were like flowers falling from the sky or UFOs decorating the landscape. The big Marie Antoinette wig was the focus of the installation: this gorgeous big wig created a constrast with the small, stained and modest Japanese "wabi-sabi" space on the mezzanine floor that evoked tea ceremony rooms and that featured just a single Japanese folding screen as minimal arrangement.
Which is your favourite wig by Tomi? And your favourite artefact from Japanese history? Dai Okumura: This big Marie Antoinette wig for sure. My favorite artefact in the long Japanese history? Too difficult to say! Can't decide! But, I can tell you that I like anonymous unknown folk and craft art pieces in the Mingei style, no matter of what form, nationality or age they may be. If I feel such a piece is nice for our times, then I like it a lot.
How did visitors react to the installation with Tomihiro Kono? Dai Okumura: Visitors fully embraced the meaning of the installation in its entirety. They also enjoyed the sale of antique pieces on the second floor and were overjoyed by being able to try on the wigs, this allowed them to pretend they were somebody else and take selfies. I think it was a very successful show for Tomihiro Kono and Tatami, but it was very enjoyable for the visitors!
All images in this post courtesy of Dai Okumura and Tomihiro Kono