Carnival/wearable-art/presence
pp. 38-41
in: Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Wolfgang Fiel, Margarete Jahrmann, Ruth Schnell (eds), New realities, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Carnival is said to be not only a celebration but also a critique of the existing social order. By initiating an event of the world upside down, carnival indicates the artificiality of any social structure. Likewise, emerging from the field of wearable technologies, one can detect wearable artistic works that seem to follow an opposite logic than the more technologically-and design-oriented experiments within wearable technologies. In a similar manner as carnival breaks the everyday routines and keeps alive the possibility of change, wearable technology art presents to us a fresh perspective with the potential for surprise. By being strongly visual, peculiar looking, and most of all physically present, these artistic wearables can be seen as a carnevalesque hap of our contemporary indulgence with technology. This paper investigates the relationship between carnival and artistic approaches to wearable technologies. The first two parts introduce the concept of carnival and three artists from the Brazilian cultural movement known as Tropicalism from the late 1960s.