Critical dressing: creative wearables and tactical practice

Symposium:

• ISEA2009: 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices I

• Critical dressing: creative wearables and tactical practice

• Susan Elizabeth Ryan

Venue(s):

• Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Ireland

• Abstract

  This paper considers the work of artists and activists who, since the 1990s, have worked with dress as survival mechanism and social tool. The result is a ‘body of records’ of performable and technological wearable practices that have resisted categorical branding. Some of the work is designed for the gallery or runway, but other pieces are presented, performed, or simply worn on the street. The latter contribute to a notion of the counter-public sphere similar to that described by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge: a space to generate fantasy and consciousness outside of structures and regimens of appropriated existence, what the authors call ‘frameworks of valorization’.

Category:

• Paper