Instead of the body clothing boldly shows itself, its shape, color, texture, how it is made, what it wants. Clothing being a message and a signature of the designer adds to the shape and identity of the person wearing it.

But it is time to go one step further.

This infra red vest not only shows itself but is continually enriched by codes which are populating our environment all the time, without being detected by the human eye.

The codes of zero’s and one’s are sent in infra red and control most devices in our environment. This 38KHz communication channel is not like radio waves, which penetrate walls and buildings but the infra red is just active and contained in our spaces for living, rooms, kitchens. So infra red code is a bit like clothing, soft, pliable and very much attached to personal space. Some complicated devices are in constant contact with the remote controls themselves, reformulating in code this personal living space.

This vest showing the codes becomes even more a bridge between the body and the environment than normal clothing. With the remote controls you can even reach out from the vest to all the devices which are intended to make life of a human being bearable. This vest is weaving an invisible web between the body and living space.

	The codes the shirt receives from different remote controls

How the infra red vest is coded can be found in this instructable:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Infra-Red-Vest-Code/

Nonetheless Dutch people have a feeling of winter and how it should be.
For this winter we made a cap, a hat, an interactive knitting.

This cap is knitted with two colors white of two kinds of wool.
The first white is blueish and is used around the rim and on top, the second white is ‘warm white’, warm being relative to the blueish.
Also the two (artificial without doubt) materials have different fancy structures, difficult to describe in words, that is why pictures exists.

The cap gives an idea of warmth and cosiness in the cold.

When daylight diminishes it starts to twinkle. There are led’s inside the cap of a third kind of white.
The bright led’s diffuse their light in a subtle way in the white materials and reinforce the idea
of warmth within a cold environment.
(The pictures actually do not show the effect in the right way, to get the led’s visible on the images the effect is exaggerated.)

Making an interactive twinkling winter cap is described in this instructable:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-an-interactive-twinkling-winter-cap/

The led’s can be programmed using a atmega328 chip, and are running on 2.8 Volts.

Bywire.net provides us kindly with a piece of 3D knitting to experiment with. With the idea of protection a body was made of the 3D knitted fabric.

The fabric can be molded a bit at the backside with threads making the front squares of the fabric a bit smaller.

The edges of the fabric were sewn with black felt making a nice contrast of softness to the rather hard knitting.

The pattern of LED’s inside the fabric is that of a fractal tree. The LED’s are lighted by a atmega328 chip running on its own timer, with two batteries, a total of 3V.

The small surface of the lasercutter was virtually extended by simple rolling up a strip of fabric near the sides. Two strips were used to make a shirt. The patterns cut out were lighted using 12 bright LED’s around the corners.

The lasercutter can both cut through paper and make lines in paper. The lasercutter making lines in the paper is comparable to the way the metal plate is prepared for etching. The plate is covered by a waxy varnis and lines are drawn in the varnis. These open lines will be deepenend, cut into the plate, by acid. These deepenend lines hold the ink while the surface of the plate can be cleaned. In a press these lines cause the ink to be transferred to the paper.

Combining the etching and the lasercutter technique is done here using a common theme of the double bird. The drawing of the double bird is done on the plate by hand and using a file made in Adobe Illustrator for the lasercutter. Both ways give rise to very fine and thin lines.

The recurrence of the same theme in two techniques binds the image together, The text hybrid refers to the way of thinking, both traditional and contemporary. The double bird is an iconic reference to the hybrid use of techniques.The printing was done on a Van Ginkel Press and on a lasercutter ( contrechoc.com and by-wire.net ).

By the way the double bird is not just a monstrous outcome of our society, it is just an observation of two crows, accidentally overlapping and not yet separated by our brains

The resulting etch-lasercut, where the “BEAM” is cut through the paper.

LED BLOCK
We started with an 8×8 LED block, green. The problem was hiding the block (6×6 cm) either in the softness of the textile, or in the visual design of the knitted cloth used for the bonnet.(In a former blogpost we have made this in an keep smiling bonnet.) For hiding the block gray, white black yarn is used.

Then we did some knitting with a knitting machine (well Gera did this in 7 minutes!) This knitting was used to hide a 16×16 LED Block (you can buy this at http://iteadstudio.com/store/ )

The LED’s on this block are a soft red, a color which fits in with the grey. On this LED block pictures are shifted making a story about a shuttle an airplane and a dancing person.

Color Display

Continuing this idea of camouflaging there was some (hand-)knitting done (by Anneke!) with a rather coarse material, resulting in a strange pink, white and black structure. We used the color-display (320×240 pixels) on a shield (also http://iteadstudio.com/store/) to imitated the texture and the visual appearance of the knitting.

We had to take an image of the knitting, used Processing to get a pixelated-image-decoding and after that loading it on the display (there was some problems with the colors…we expected RGB but color was an integer like 0xfff0, R 0-31, G 0-63, B 0-31, the conversion form RGB in Processing to ITEAD coding was not straightforward and took some time).

You can see some results using this display. We made several attempts to camouflage different textiles. The best was the camouflaging of our microwave background shirt. This is a textile with a big photo on it (see another blog post). This is false color coding of the universe and apparently the universe is liking this display, the other textiles  do not perform very well in camouflaging.

The color temperature of the display, the digital camera, the light when taking the final picture (the digital camera sees other things then we do…certainly with LED’s!) all influence the final judgement: does it do a good job camouflaging or not.

As you can see most of the time there is a big difference, but these are the pictures and reality (seeing it with your own eyes) is different again.

With OLED screens, all these problems will be solved in a second (or not

The 16×16 LED block is connected to a Atmega32 (very big thing!)
The 320 x 240 colorscreen is on a ITEAD shield for the arduino
The 8×8 LED block is connected to its own atmega328 (stand alone chip, no arduino)

The LED’s at the side register the horizon and store the number of times you drop your head. This dropping is compared to the number of times you look happily up, nose in the air.

This bonnet already has been made in 3 versions, but even now the design needs to be improved, we will make a knitted version soon.

The video below  shows the principle of the horizon, on a paper sun hat. This strange thing was replaced by a white version having ribbons on it to give room to the rather thick LED thing, and the batteries at the other side.

The circle cloth is chosen to camouflage the hard LED square a bit, but how nice this kind of dessin is for a skirt, it is rather strange for a bonnet.

Sometimes this searching for the right materials takes over the project, sometimes the technology drags on….this is the world of smart textiles!

Thx to Gera to do some modelling!

a line of LED’s showing the horizon

take care of yourself, maybe you are too sad!

happiness indicator!

two versions of the bonnet, the LED matrix runs on 2 AAA batteries, the chip has a tilt sensor attached.

and here is the video of the paper sun hat, showing only the horizontal line of LED’s, not the smileys:

(must become a commercial succes!)
so here is the instructable, with an AVR project based on a ATTINY45 for this butterfly.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Wedding-Butterfly/

In this instructable you can find details about code, tools, and components.

This time part of the making of, later on the result. The final result will be a dress made from felt having three flexible circles with LED’s built in, one in front, two at the back.

Here are a few images of the making of a circle of LED’s.

But there is a site which is much more appropriate to explain the making of: www.instructables.com
So there it is: the instructable to make a flexible circle of LED’s

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-flexible-ring-of-LEDs/

a few images:

Patterns will be added and….

The complete dress will be finished soon!

The hand made felt is folded which gives  a richly textured surface and on this surface there are small lights. These LED’s are individually coded and form a varied display of patterns.

The LED’s on the back represent the filament of space, visible in the now famous microwave background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang. The filaments of matter, and for the rest empty space, space is like a sponge!

On the shoulders there are LED shapes representing colliding galaxies. Some friends asked why these galaxies are colliding but still not moving, the answer is simple: a collision of galaxies takes several 100 millions of years…the slowest dance of the universe…

On the front is the infinity sign made up of green square LED’s. Infinity is everywhere and nowhere but that is maths! Signs is what we are waiting for, sign’s of other life. Is life there somewhere close? Hopefully not! These aliens will be without doubt more intelligent than we are and we are likely to be harvested like the sheep for the felt…

Then this vest is interactive, it listens, it observes – for “modulated” radiation. It could be the light of pulsars, those mad stars spinning incredible fast. But no, not pulsars, indeed the observational powers of this vest are of another nature. Modulated emissions by humans it is waiting for, in the infrared, in the radio waves and in the visible light.

If the vest receives some of these signs of life, the vest will react. Visibly but also in radio waves…try to receive these waves!

The only classical feature of astronomy retained in the vest is a clock! But the clock is ticking a bit strange, more concentrated on interesting time properties than showing time as humans seem to appreciate it. This is also modern astronomy; time has disappeared in space structures about 100 years ago.  In the patch theory time events can easily be reversed, humanized order seems to be lacking.

Is the universe as exciting as this vest? Strange enough, no! Mathematical space (differential manifolds) can be a complex  and funny as you want, real space is rather “flat”. This seems to be the result of faster than light speed expansion in the early microseconds of the universe which is called “inflation”. Of course this dullness is compensated nowadays by an unknown effect causing accelerated expansion of the universe.

(Potential extraterrestrial buyers are advised to contact the vest at 914MHz or the infrared.)

Design, felting & technology: Contrechoc