A Gordan Savicic’s “old” (2007) work “Costraint City – The Pain of Everyday life“, which I recently discovered, thanks to Régine Debatty.
An electronic corset equipped with servo motors and intended to be worn when walking/détouring, exploits electromagnetic waves generated by wireless networks spread over the urban territory: the higher the number of networks along the route, the proportionally tighter the corset gets.
This device works fetching informations from GoogleMaps, detecting the access point by a wi-fi enabled Nintendo DS Lite console, booted with a Gentoo Linux release, and it translates ethereal signals into a physical experience of game of pain/torture.
Setting up an innovative way of experiencing the city in its most invisible manifestations, the device allows for alternative conceptual implications, like a sort of a cyber Via Crucis, bringing in all the pain and even the esthetics of Media-eval tortures (thanks: Neural). A more challenging discourse could be the parallelism between surveillance life, whose Panopticon is directly carved onto the body, and consumer society, where a fashionable accessory could be considered either pleasing by someone or binding and sore by someone other.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gX7g0V0-Cw
Related: Stahl Stenslie‘s project The Walker; (a mechanical corset gets tighter at every step you take, until it gets you suffocate)
Boingboing tv’s report on the Space Couture runway show;
WMMNA’s Harmful clothing.
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