Jayne Wallace: Digital Jewelry
blog Thursday 28th of May, 2009
Yesterday I made it to Super Mondays for the first time. Like many of the amazing things going on in this town, I only recently found out about it — I was gutted to find out that I missed a talk on Arduino recently. Not that I was disappointed at all, as there was a load of great stuff to see — students from the Culture Lab were demonstrating their work. This included 'home-made' multitouch computers and their 'ambient kitchen' project, which is aimed at helping sufferers of dementia to retain independence in the kitchen, and features Wiimote-based utensils which are able to sense the action which is being performed. Following the general demonstrations, there were several interesting talks — Patrick Olivier kicked off with an introduction to the work that takes place in the lab, and later Andrew Waite gave a short but informative talk about collecting Malware with the low-interaction honeypot Nepenthes. For me though the highlight of the talks was digital jeweller Jayne Wallace talking about the amazing work she has created with the lab.
Jayne's creations explore the overlap between the functions of jewellery and digital technology. Rather than focussing on the obvious hybrids that could be created by shoehorning modern digital functionality into existing paradigms of jewellery, these pieces are created from the ground up as a response to individual cases. For example, a matched pair of necklaces, made for a mother and daughter, can wirelessly transmit a 'caress' from one to the other. In some cases, the digital functionality is used to 'actualise' the usual abstract meaning of the pieces. Where traditionally these objects are imbued with personal significance by their owners, here they are also given the ability to communicate this significance to others — like a necklace which can trigger short clips of silent film to be played on nearby displays.
My favourite example mentioned in the talk was Blossom, a piece which reflects the reciever's Cypriot roots and love of nature. The object initially takes the form of a closed flower; a metal structure allows the flower to blossom when activated. However, this action is only able to occur once, at a predetermined signal — a rain sensor is planted on the subject's family land in Cyprus, and signals the flower to bloom once a certain amount of rain has fallen on the area. This amount could take months or even years to fall, and the triggering event may happen without the attention of the piece's owner. Tellingly, this rejection of digital technology's usual tenets (user-centricity, immediacy, and reuse) caused some confusion from the lab's technically-minded people. Crucially though, by rejecting these usual key concepts, the piece moves beyond the simple artifice of an object modelled into a natural form — it retains the natural quality of being 'disinterested' in its owner, working to a symbolic, yet completely natural timetable.
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sarah. Sunday 28th of June, 2009.
This is different, can inspire different creative medias too. Great conceptual pieces.