 |
|
A designer uses the information on your hard drive to create personalized clothing.
By Karen E. Steen
The Metropolis Observed
December 2002
When he thought about the way his actions were being logged by banks, video
stores, and supermarket club cards, artist-designer Brian Janusiak felt
naked. "I was feeling a little bit exposed: someone was stripping me
of my information," says the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
artist in residence. "Then I started thinking, That's interesting:
what would it be to reclothe someone in their own information?" His
project Fragmentation: Heavy, which was exhibited at Egopark Gallery
in Oakland, California, last summer, addressed the notion by patterning
custom sweaters on information taken from the personal computers of six
Bay Area residents.
To come up with the patterns, Janusiak gave each participant off-the-shelf
software by Norton Utilities that reorders and optimizes a computer's hard
drive when the information on it becomes fragmented. "It's a very simple
utility, but they put this color depiction with it to try to show you what
it's doing," Janusiak says. "It's different every time, and it's
just beautiful." With the help of textile specialist Reiner Rockel
he programmed the machines at Oakland's Creative Knitting Company to turn
each person's color depiction into a cotton-lycra sweater.
Now Janusiak is designing his own software to capture a more personalized
level of information: it might search for strings of text related to specific
subjects or measure anxiousness by how often a person clicks his or her
mouse. Ultimately he plans to sell the software in clothing stores: customers
would download it onto their computers for a set time limit, then e-mail
the resulting files to a manufacturer that would produce a one-of-a-kind
sweater from it.
Although the information is worn openly on the sweaters, the color coding
makes it impossible to access, which Janusiak hopes will create a sense
of being protected by one's own data, rather than exposed by it. "People
really do feel this inundation with information on a visceral level,"
he says. "They don't even know what to do with it anymore, and there's
no outlet for it. This project has been a way people can understand that."
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
