Interfaces Montréal

Inside Digital Matter

Joanna Berzowska

Assistant Professor, Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University

Electronic garments that consume the body

Joanna Berzowska is the research director of XS Labs, where her team develops innovative methods and applications in electronic textiles and responsive garments. She received her Masters of Science from MIT for her work titled Computational Expressionism and worked with the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab on research projects such as the musicBottles. Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, V&A in London, Millenium Museum in Beijing, SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, ISEA, the Art Directors Club in NYC, Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others. She was recently selected for the Maclean’s 2006 Honour Roll as one of “thirty nine Canadians who make the world a better place to live in”.

Berzowska will give a brief overview of XS Labs, research, with a particular emphasis on her most recent project, the Skorpions. Skorpions refers to six kinetic electronic garments that move and change on the body in response to various internal and external stimuli. Skorpions integrate electronic fabrics, shape-changing materials such as Nitinol, mechanical actuators such as magnets, soft electronic circuits, and traditional textile construction techniques such as sculptural folds and drapes of fabric across the body.

Skorpions reference the history of garments as instruments of PAIN and DESIRE. They hurt you and distort our bodies the same way that corsets and foot binding did. They emphasize our lack of control over our garments and over our digital technologies. Our clothes shift and change in ways that we do not anticipate. Our electronics malfunction and become obsolete.