V2_ Knowledgebase

Intensive research carried out worldwide for creating higher forms of materials, structures and systems by providing them with “life” functions, resulted in a relatively high level of technology readiness with several applications now emerging, demonstrating that smart materials technologies have matured well beyond the conceptual stage. Widespread use of nanotechnology concepts and tools and availability of multiscale computational models coupled with the exponential growth of computing capability and the merging of materials science and engineering with biological information, are fuelling the rate of advancement of the field. Nevertheless further substantial developments are required in the understanding of convergences of materials, electronics and biological systems, to meet relevant needs for present and foreseeable applications. The several Symposia featured by CIMTEC 2012 - 4th International Conference “Smart Materials, Structures and Systems” will cover outstanding areas of the subject from the molecular nanoscales to large complex integrated systems. The Conference Committees are pleased to invite you to foster progress in the field by contributing to discussions within the frames of what promises to be an exciting meeting, and to enjoy the immense, unique, artistic heritage and wonderful landscape of Tuscany.

Thesis: This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able. As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through “open source” fashion “cookbooks”. By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative “hacking” at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on.

covers emerging architectural and artistic practices where digital technologies & virtual spaces merge with tangible and physical spatial experiences. An active architecture, sensing, observing, feeling, listening, thinking, reacting, proposing, adapting, learning, even sometimes interacting. It is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations.

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre is an exhibition centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries. But it is also a venue for artistic and technological production, research and training; and for the dissemination of new forms of art and industrial creation. To fulfil these goals, laboral will be a space for exchange between different art disciplines; a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary centre and a dynamic environment for creators / works / researchers / teachers / audiences.

Black Dog Publishing. Exploring this concept through the last 50 years of contemporary art and design, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception examines the work of key practitioners in this field, from Rebecca Horn’s object based installations, Stelarc’s robotic body extensions to Carsten Höllers’ physically interactive sculptures. The works and artists illustrated throws into consideration how we see and sense the world around us through artistic interpretation. Whether extending these senses through projections, technological spectacles or even telepathy, our perceptual limitations are challenged and our senses realized visually. Analyzing the importance and influence of body-scaled sensory experiments, Schwartzman reveals the fascinating relationship between senses, body, art and perception.

Barbara Layne is the Director of Studio subTela at the Hexagram Institute where she works with a team of graduate students from Visual Arts and Engineering at Concordia University and a variety of international collaborators. The Studio is focused on the development of intelligent cloth structures for the creation of artistic, performative and functional textiles. Natural materials are woven in alongside microcomputers and sensors to create surfaces that are receptive and responsive to external stimuli. Controllable arrays of Light Emitting Diodes present changing patterns and texts through the structure of cloth. Wireless transmission systems have also been developed to support real time communication. In both wearable systems and site related installations, textiles are used to address the social dynamic of fabric and human interaction.

We seek to make Kaunas biennial TEXTILE the most significant event for contemporary textile art in Europe, which reflects analytically the art processes currently taking place all over the world, by bringing up the priorities of creative collaboration, openness and democratic relationships in the processes of art creation and its perception. Kaunas Biennial is a platform and a real opportunity for - artists’ debates and the realisation of innovative ideas, - collaboration among artists and visitors, - the enhancement of the sense of community through creative activities, - interdisciplinary artistic and academic practices, - international and intercontinental partnerships and - the creation of a discursive textile culture.