My first more serious idea for this project was to do something having to do with reusability/disposability, ideally something that would reverse the normal relationship where a person wears and wears out and replaces clothing. I wasn't sure how this would actually work, practically, since making something that would alter the human body that wears it without changing itself is a pretty tall order. The most pure implementation of the idea would have been clothing that actually kills its wearer, before moving on to a new one, which wouldn't be really practical for obvious reasons.
I was thinking maybe something wearable that would leave some sort of stamped or stenciled design on a person's skin, and over time the design would get more and more overlapped over itself and messy and unreadable, thereby 'using up' the human canvas it was marking upon. The only semi-practical implementation of this I could think of is maybe some sort of large bracelet thing with an inked design on the inside, and when you spun it around your wrist hoola-hoop style it would leave behind markings. The hurdle I couldn't really overcome was how to keep the design always inked, especially since I wanted contrast between the wearer being disposable and the wearable being reusable. Having the user re-ink the clothing themselves seemed like it would undermine the agency of the clothing itself and the reverse power relationship I wanted to build.
My next idea was to make something where both the wearer and the clothing would be worn out over an accelerated period of time. This seemed more doable since I could do something where the act of the clothing falling apart would stain the wearer. My initial thought was to use some sort of paper, whether that's tissue paper or paper towels or actual tissues, and construct a garment where the material would be soaked in some sort of pigment that would rub off and stain the skin.
I was concerned the project wasn't technological enough, though technically I guess you could consider ink and paper to be a type of technology. I thought about how I could enhance my potential garment to make it more hi-tech. LED's seemed random and superfluous. I needed something that would maybe work as a catalyst to the disintegration of the garment. The thing I finally stumbled upon was this little hand-held fan I had, which I thought I could use to speed up the entropy of my project, either by directing the wind it produced at some particularly delicate section of tissue, or by actually attaching something to the wings of the fan, where it would spin around and gradually break off or knock other things off. Tassels seemed like a good idea all around - they could catch the wind, tear off, snag on other things, fly around and stain stuff, etc. I could maybe cut my material into strips and weave them directly into the structure of it, which would have the added bonus of emphasizing the garment as a textile.
The problem with the fan, of course, was that it was pretty heavy itself and would need to be attached to some non-disintegratable surface. I didn't consider this a huge obstacle, since I could use the same thing as a sort of skeleton for the rest of my garment, so it would disintegrate in place and hopefully not just fall off me - I even had this blue belt thing that I'd gotten for free in mind. A bigger problem was that the influence of the fan would need to be pretty localized, and I couldn't really think of a way around that, and I couldn't really reconcile with the sort of lopsided aesthetic that would mandate.
Worse, my preliminary tests re: staining, conducted with food coloring, didn't go so well. I figured food coloring was a strong enough pigment while being non-toxic and probably wouldn't mess anything up too badly if I got it on things that weren't just me. When it was wet it transferred its color immediately and pretty much all at once, which wasn't what I wanted, and when it was dry it didn't transfer over very well at all, which was surprising, given my experience with the stuff. I was pretty unsatisfied.
I considered other materials, including something organic (which had implications I didn't really want to pursue) and the cotton candy idea Katerie came up with. Cotton candy was good in that it would probably stain as it melted, and in that it probably would melt pretty easily, considering the humidity. The problem would be with getting it to maintain even momentary structural integrity. Anything bigger than a bracelet would be pretty hard to manage, and I thought I would need something bigger to get past the impact of those novelty candy-bracelets. The recipe Katerie emailed me, while definitely intriguing, also seemed pretty finicky, and I was not at all confident in my ability to implement it and get any sort of usable result. If I'd had access to commercially produced cotton candy I probably would have considered it more seriously, but as it was the ginger-bread house associations of an edible garment would have probably clouded what I was trying to communicate anyway.
I decided I needed a new idea. After some brainstorming I decided to concentrate on the identity-altering property of clothing.
In practice, clothing is a large part of how we determine the identity of the people we come across. We expect certain people to be dressed in certain ways, and we make a lot of assumptions about them just based on presentation, including, a lot of times, value-judgments.
I wanted to make something that would use technology to instantaneously flip between two or more contradictory 'presentations' in order to emphasize their inherent unreliability. It would pretty much have to be something symbolic, since I wouldn't realistically instantaneously change a person's whole attire to get a different effect.
I thought about making a set of devil horns and a halo with LED's, with the user being able to switch between them, so one is dark while the other one glows. It occurred to me I could use the fan I was previously considering for my first idea in order to make a halo.
Upon further reflection, I decided against making the devil horns - it seemed a little too gimmicky, and there's not a lot of reason for anybody to want to present themselves as evil, and that's what it was supposed to be about. The halo itself would have an on/off state, which satisfied my desire for instantaneous transformation. The good thing about the fan-halo also would be that unlike, say, a glow-stick halo, is that in the off state it wouldn't be immediately obvious what it was in the on state.
The first problem that became immediately obvious when I actually tried to build the halo was that there would be no way to power the LED's from the same circuit as was powering the fan motor, since the one part would be spinning and the other wouldn't, which meant I'd need two separate switches, one to turn on the LED's and one to turn on the actual fan. I wasn't particularly pleased with this.
Luckily, I used my brother, who is just getting his masters in electrical/computer engineering, as a technical advisor, and he suggested I do a makeshift accelerometer type thing where the centrifugal force of the top, spinney part of the fan spinning around would cause two loops of wire to touch, thereby completing the surface and effectively acting as a switch that auto-detects whether the fan's motor is on.
(He also told me how big of a resistor to use, and let me borrow his soldering iron and this cool little tool that looks like a screwdriver with the end chopped off, with two tiny holes at the end where you stick wires, and it makes it really easy to wrap one end of the wire around the other for a really secure connection.)
Deconstructing the fan was really easy, though I was pretty worried at the time I was going to accidentally break something I'd need later. The top spinney part had an easily removable pair of fan blades, and came pre-prepared with a pair of notches where the blades used to be which I could use to feed my LED wires through, and a convenient hollow space inside where I could put the accelerometer, the resistor, and most of my connecting wire bits. Only the batteries needed to be stuck outside of it, and they conveniently sized to fit onto the spinney part's flat top.
I used white LED's on my first attempt at constructing the halo, making a prototype circuit where the accelerometer was omitted (so the circuit was always closed and the light was always on) and nothing was actually soldered yet, just securely wrapped together. The prototype halo was around a foot in diameter and had one LED at each end, connected in parallel to a single quarter-sized batter. The initial result was somewhat less than satisfactory. The LED's weren't all that bright, and with the circumference of the halo being so large it didn't make a very convincing illusion of a seamless circle. Adding a second battery in series on top of the one already taped down helped a little, but not that much.
When I cut a hole in the hat and stuck the fan into it, between the layers of fabric, to test out what it would look like, the LED wires would knock against the hat and get stuck a little whenever I moved my head. It probably didn't help that the two 3volt LED batteries weren't very well balanced on the spinney part, so they were slowing it down a little. It occurred to me it would help if the fan was spinning faster, so the disk of the halo, so to speak, would stay flatter. This might also help with the continuous circle illusion.
It turned out that the fan still contained the original batteries that it came with, and they were a little weirdly sized (the end bits stuck out more than they usually do), and I had to bend some stuff around to get my standard sized AA's to fit. The new batteries made the fan go a lot faster, and this did help a lot, but it was still too dim and still getting snagged on things, so that when it finally got a little too snagged and fell apart I decided I needed to start over with new LED's.
I didn't have any other ones that were a suitably angelic color, but I did have some marginally brighter reddish-orange and green ones, which would make yellow additively, which I thought might look cool. Halo 2.0 had two sets of 2 LED's connected in series, with the sets themselves connected in parallel to the batteries (which were connected in series).
The legs of the LED's were trimmed and securely wrapped, folded over, soldered, slathered in hot glue and covered in electrical tape while still hot for an aerodynamic effect. I made the wires a lot shorter this time around, too, since I figured any glowing, vaguely yellow circle hovering over a person's head was probably going to read like a halo, even if it isn't that big. I re-taped the batteries to the top of the spinney part with the electrical tape under tension, so they wouldn't wiggle around and become unbalanced like they did last time.
Getting the accelerometer working took a lot of fiddling. The inner end of the wire had to be precarious enough so that it would get pushed into the outer wire by centrifugal force and springy enough that it wouldn't touch it when the fan was off. I ended up rolling a loop of uninsulated wire at the end of the inner wire and sticking a drop of hot glue on the back end of it, for added mass (and therefore added precariousness). I think the problem I had for a long time was that the inner wire was being pushed outwards by the centrifugal force - but so was the outer wire, so they never connected securely. I ended up hot gluing everything inside the hollow spinney fan part in place, so it wouldn't move around and mess up the balance of the accelerometer connection.
An unintended but pretty interesting side-effect of the accelerometer was that when the fan was being turned on or turned off there would be a moment where the connection between the wires wouldn't be all that secure, and the LED's would blink for a little while while the fan sped up, causing an interesting pixilated effect on the halo, especially with the sort of three-dimensionality it had as a result of the multiple LED's. I thought this really worked to emphasize the digital nature of the halo, which was important to my concept in that the halo itself was supposed to be a very digital, technological solution to a problem of perceived morality.
I was a little concerned the hat's intent as a representation of the limitations technology has in its potential to solve humanity's problems would be lost under the gimmicky factor of a halo-hat. I thought I could make some sort of fake website where the hat would be advertised with the stated purpose of a device which improves a person's moral standing, to contextualize the work a little.
The addition of sound was also supposed to help emphasize the hat as something that's supposed to make you seem more genuinely angelic. The guy at Radio Shack actually demonstrated the recording apparatus for me in the store, and it seemed to work well enough. I don't know, maybe I accidentally damaged it in some way while sewing it into the hat, because it didn't record my angelic bells very well.
I think I might have had more trouble with the sewing on the hat than with the soldering. I tried to hem the hole around where the fan would stick out, to keep it from fraying and getting in the way of the halo, and at one point the seams of the hat started to fall apart a little, and I had to sew those back together too. I mostly tried to stick things in between the layers of the hat and do as little sewing as possible. I think I eventually decided against following through on making the hat into an optional grocery-store sock-mask disguise in fear that if I started cutting into it it would fall apart altogether.
I eventually decided against a website as being a little too far removed from the actual hat. Instead I wrote up an advertisement, formatted in black and white somewhat like a traditional artist statement, and stuck it and the hat on a podium, in order to emphasize the hat's nature as both a pseudo-commercial prototype and an art object. I'm not sure how well this came across in the critique.
The text of my advertisement:
Improve your moral character today with
The Saint–O–Matic
Do people find you untrustworthy? Unreliable? Do the snags in your web of lies interfere with your credibility at work or at home? Having trouble regaining a sense of respectability after that prison sentence?
Look no further! The scientists at instaTech corporation have found the answer to your problems!
People have been relying on apparel to signify their moral values for millennia – now instaTech has taken propriety to the next level with a unique technological approach that cuts straight to the heart of the matter. The Saint–O–Matic cranial-apparel system is 100% guaranteed to instantly improve your respectability: simply don the unit over your head and activate instaTech’s patented halo-technology - anyone gazing upon you now is sure to be impressed by a visible manifestation of your moral purity!
Not saintly enough? For an extra boost, simply depress the discreetly-placed aural-enhancement button to release a near-subliminal bolt of heavenly chimes from the unit’s on-board speakers – straight into your friends’ and coworkers’ subconscious minds, forever altering their associations with your presence.
The Saint–O–Matic: become a better person – instantly!
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