The project "Vestis" has been developed and pointed out the use of a wearable device as a potential interface of reconfiguring the corporeal schema and lived experiences of bodily spatiality. The artist intends to formalize the individual's personal boundaries aesthetically as the result of a fluid process of "body spaces" contractions and expansions. Then, the "embodied space" can be formalized by an interactive process between the wearer using "Vestis" and participants around him/her. The first prototype of "Vestis" has a structure with four nylon tubes that can expand and shrink independently (figure 1); these tubes movements formalize different shapes and contours at each moment of the dialogue between participants and the wearer. This dynamic form is possible with a telescopic assembly of tubes that enables perimeter variations. A microcontroller defines and controls all these movements after getting inputs from embedded sensors that measure participants' presence.
People need to wear "Vestis" and experience their own body and space; then, getting involved in the work process they will perceive the changes the dialogue/interaction among them can provoke. Some shapes of "Vestis" could restrict wearer's displacements and legs/arms movements, then emphasizing sensorially the fact we "have bodies" and "are bodies". "Vestis" tries to play a poetic way with visual and tactile channels for experiencing "embodied spaces", evoking participants' engagement as an effective and affective negotiation of the use of body connections.
By wearing wearable computers the "body" becomes an entity technologically mediated to operate simultaneously in different contexts and spatial dimensions not related, as several "folds" of existence. "Vestis" tries to (re)configure the wearer's body dynamically, formalizing her/his action spaces as Merleau-Ponty (1999) wrote "…my body can be understood as a system of possible actions, which has its circumstantial space defined by its activities and situation. My body is there where it has something to do".
Recent Exhibitions:
Cyber Fashion Show, SIGGRAPH2005, Los Angeles, EUA, 2005. http://psymbiote.org/cyfash/
Kinetic_Digital Exhibition, Itaú Cultural Institute, São Paulo, 2005. http://www.itaucultural.org.br/cineticodigital/
Interactive Computer Art Exhibition, Bank of Brazil Cultural Center, Brasília, 2004. http://www.bb.com.br/appbb/portal/hs/exp4d/index.jsp
