LoveJackets

In 1995 I made several pairs of jackets where each one emits and polls for a particular signal. Once the pair find each other, in a 10 feet distance radius, facing each other, the two start beeping in a call and response conversational tone, never at the same time, emitting a sound akin to crickets mating, and a pattern of LEDs blinks in unison to the sound.

Each jacket only responds to its unique pair. The technology used is basic: an infra-red receiver and transmitter, a PIC chip (Peripheral Interface Controller; a precursor to Arduino) that controls the LEDs and speaker output and sends out the ‘bits’ of code that allow the pair to find each other. The components were as miniaturised and seamlessly integrated into the garment as possible but because of the material limitations of the time, hacked together with salvaged headphone wires for connecting the various components, and a lot of heat-shrink tubing, hot glue, electrical, paper, and duct tape. The LoveJackets, in their proto-technology simplicity and with their 9 Volt replaceable battery, amazingly, still work today.

The LoveJackets aimed to explore social interactional patterns and institute new ones.

While the LoveJackets aimed to explore social interactional patterns and institute new ones, they also elaborated on ways in which technology could seamlessly be integrated in garments to create a type of second skin, an interactive interface between the body and its exteriority, but also to explore new materials and their expressive potentialities. The aim of the LoveJackets was not to create ‘cyber’ garments but use technology in surprising, poetic, and innovative ways and place emphasis not on the technology but on its uses and how it could initiate serendipitous and unexpected encounters. Infra-red was used both to accentuate the possibility of communication through an invisible spectrum, making visible the invisible energy forces that surround being, and because of its inherent limitation: infra-red only works in ‘line-of-sight.’ The two wearers had to literally ‘see’ each other for the LoveJackets to be activated.

1995 was a time when technology was viewed with optimism, fascination and unbridled curiosity about what was to come, fascination with the potential for using technology to question notions of identity and belonging, the boundaries between human and non-human and approaching technology as a vehicle to overcome dualities and engage with new epistemological and ontological models, best exemplified in Haraway’s seminal Cyborg Manifesto, originally published in 1985 in the Socialist Review.

Embodied artifacts could function as philosophy machines.

The LoveJackets were indeed questioning such boundaries and potentialities but were also an exploration of how art practices could function as props and prompts to interrogate emerging relationships with technology, how embodied artifacts could function as philosophy machines, taking complex concepts and devising ways to manifest and circulate ideas into new and quotidian realms. When people wore them in galleries and museums where they were exhibited, they felt a child-like giddiness, playing games of hide and seek, coming close and turning around, developing spontaneous choreographies. There was something about the utter simplicity of this embodied idea that resonated with audiences.

The LoveJackets were inspired by Plato’s Symposium where Aristophanes discusses the original human nature as one of two parts fused in perfect union before Zeus, deliberating with the other gods, in an attempt to humble human pride and make humans ‘weaker and more useful [to us] through the increase in their numbers’, cuts them in half. So the LoveJackets present that moment of delight and completeness where the two original halves find each other and exult in their perfect union.

The LoveJackets felt at the time as the introduction of a type of ‘desiring technology.’ And indeed, the LoveJackets were an exploration of how desire and poetry can be part of technological systems, and therefore resist and subvert subordination to notions of efficiency and reductivism that thirty years later have come to dominate the uses of technology and human-machine relationships.