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Section 5 - Dress me up

(1) Film changes sexual binary implications of passive and active – the Lumiere Brothers new ‘filmstrip’ dimension conincided with the first public striptease in Paris, 1895. But Louis Lumiere said of their cinématographe that it was 'the invention without a future."


Character 1
(2) Below is Jana Sterbak’s Artist’s Statement

I want you to feel the way I do: There's barbed wire wrapped all around my head and my skin grates on my flesh from the inside. How can you be so comfortable only 5" to the left of me? I don't want to hear myself think, feel myself move. It's not that I want to be numb, I want to slip under your skin: I will listen for the sound you hear, feed on your thought, wear your clothes.

Now I have your attitude and you're not comfortable anymore. Making them yours you relieved me of my opinions, habits, impulses. I should be grateful but instead ... you're beginning to irritate me: I am not going to live with myself inside your body, and I would rather practice being new on someone else.

That and a good essay about her work is in the catalogue for Rites of Passage – an important exhibition for me in that it showed that Nicholas Serota had killed painting and I had a sense of moving on.
Rites of Passage – Art for the end of the century, Essay on Jana Sterbak’s work by Frances Morris, Tate Gallery Publications, 1995, ISBN 1 8 54371568

(3) I am using Dress in a similiar way to Laura Mulvey's use of Gaze in that she uses the capital G in the term - The Gaze – as an explanatory concept. Dress is to 'put on one's clothes, put clothes on (someone), wear clothes in a particular way or of a particular type: she dresses well, put clothes on for a formal occasion (dress up), dress in smart or formal clothes or in a special costume, decorate in an artistic or attractive way, clean, treat or apply dressing to a wound...' Covering the body is analogous to covering the wound.

(4) This is a quote from the seminal - Zeros + Ones - Digitial Women + The New Technoculture by Sadie Plant - published by Fourth Estate, 1997, ISBN 1-85702-386-2 - in this quote Plant quotes Freud and then goes on to tell us Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari opinion of Freud - 'an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities.'


(5) Mobile Users ‘Ape Monkeys’ by John Ezard, The Guardian, 5/12/01

Gossip on mobile phones has turned into "the equivalent of social grooming among primates" according to a survey out today.

This grooming process — comparable to the way apes clean each other's fur—has become vital as an antidote to the pressures and alienation of modern life.

The survey, by the Oxford based Social Issues Research Centre for BT cellnet, found that only 17% of a sample of 1,000 people said they used their mobiles mainly for work.

Most used them mainly for keeping in touch and gossip, although a third kept them for emergency calls only.
Three quarters gossiped on them at least once a week and a third did so every day. Most gossip conversations lasted only five minutes.

The survey found that text messaging had become "the 21st century equivalent of saying hello over. the garden fence"

Some,27% of men, compared with 21% of women, admitted making calls primarily for gossip, which 26% of men referred to as "keeping in touch"

But when some were questioned in focus groups, this often proved to be "essentially a euphemism for gossip"
Women accused men of failing to realise the importance of detail and feedback in gossip. They did not know how to pass on gossip in 'then he said' and ‘then she said'sequences.

"It's no good unless you know what people actually said," a focus group woman complained.
Neither did men realise that they had to keep saying "No— really?" and "Oh my God" to spur on the person telling them gossip.

Technology and clothing is currently modelled on male casual wear - as below
these images contrast sharply with Sterbak's IW YTFTWID - which to me epitomises the essense of technology interacting with the body - it FRIES.


Find Etextile stuff at:
http://www.softswitch.co.uk/
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_hellweg080102.asp
http://www.usc.edu/isinews/stories/57.html
The idea that cloth is going to be made that is conductive of WiFi signals is great – we can be a working browser just like the woman in the AOL adverts. In the meantime computer wear looks like the above and can’t go in the wash – stinky. The Levis i-wear jacket was a commercial/fashion failure.

Levi's® ICD™® collection is no longer available

ICD™® site >> has been >> discontinued >>
From http://www.levis-icd.com/

Character 2
(6) Leigh Bowery

With wearable computer technology being very male – I wanted to base my ideas of WCT on something more feminine. Therefore I am looking at Leigh Bowery's costumes for inspiration.

Leigh Bowery, Violette Editions, London, 1998 ISBN 1-900828-04-9 – is one of my favourite books – it’s a beautiful object.

The below website was very useful
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~karlpeter/zeugma/inters/bowery.htm
Goodbye To The Boy From Sunshine
Written 1995. Copyright Karl-Peter Gottschalk1997. The Zeugma Interviews

(7) Queer Theorist Judith Butler explores the formation of identity as ‘performative’ – we can ‘act’ the norm or we can make a choice and subvert the norms – an ‘act’ of transgression = trespass. Working against boundaries of ORDER.

(8) 'Slasher and Final Girl" - This relates to Men, Women and Chainsaws - Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J Clover, published by Princetown University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-691-04802-9

(9) This is the site is for the New York Museum of Nightclub Fashion http://www.mothernyc.com/dci/

(10) Description of one of Leigh's costumes.

(11) Description of one of Leigh's performances.


Character 3
(12) Melanie Manchot

Manchot is best known for her mother’s Liminial Portraits and her video work A Moment Between Strangers where she asks over 100 men and women to kiss her. Below is her Artist Statement (13)


My recent work is based on issues of female representation. Over the past two years I have mainly been working with my own body and that of my mother. Working on over life-size nudes of my mother came out of a desire to work with an older woman's body in the process of aging.

These images attempt to set a counterpoint to prevailing images of the female body(through media mainly)and to what is considered beautiful and sexy in a society that tends to equate beauty with youth.

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