 I'm your hero for this afternoon and have the pleasure and honor to introduce to you our first speaker of this afternoon. Her name is Plusea. Do I spell this correctly? Plusea and Plusea is actually an e-textile tailor. She's willing to share with us skills and all kinds of handicaps and swearing that she actually and time that she lost while doing her projects. So give her a warm welcome please. Plusea will really bring us this news. Thank you. Yeah thank you to the CCC camp for this opportunity to speak about my work. Before I introduce myself I think I'd actually like to introduce the materials that I work with. The e-textiles. So what is e-textiles? Who here has heard the word before if you could raise your hand? Nice. So it comes from electronic and textile and the idea is to integrate electronic functionality into textile materiality and in order to do that one of the first starting points is you need to start with some kind of structures that both conduct electricity but can also be used to construct textile structures. So something as simple as almost the equivalent to a wire a conductive thread but while wires tend to be made out of copper which has not got so much tensile strength. Conductive threads are often engineered so that you can sew them and weave them and knit them without getting kinks and then breaking. And one way that that's done is by plating synthetic fiber that's very strong and can be sewn with a thin layer of metals so a lot of conductive e-textile materials are metallic and these coatings on the threads they work better on smooth surfaces so a lot of these are synthetic materials. But another way to do it is to kind of almost spin the thread from a combination of like a real metal that's not so strong with a material that is so again sometimes synthetic fibers or in the images we just saw some close-ups of a stainless steel fiber that's mixed with wool and then spun to make threads that are sewable, knitable. And then once you have this thread you can work it into fabrics. Sometimes fabrics are first produced woven or knit and then coated but sometimes these are woven or knit from these conductive threads themselves. Sometimes these fabrics are stretchy, sometimes they're not, sometimes when they're stretchy you can actually sense changes in stretch through the changes in resistance that happen in the material. And some of these materials also have piezo-resistive effects meaning that you can squeeze or squish them between two electrodes and again measure a change in resistance and be able to translate that into building sensors. And so well I just mentioned the kind of metallic coatings and fibers in the threads for often highly conductive materials. There's another technique of coating or polymerizing materials with inherently conductive polymers. And here's some images and these tend to be black so this is a power mesh fabric that's been polymerized and when you stretch it you see the polymerization works on parts of the material that are black but these white threads that are probably an elastane too smooth for the polymerization to hold so they stay white. So these are the materials that I spend a lot of my time working with and often even I when I was new to the field thought that these were all these new things that were being developed but when over time I started to realize that this combination of metal and textile work is not so new. It wasn't traditionally done for electronic purposes but for decorative means. And even one of the main manufacturers of a conductive thread that we use a lot and that's also been ordered for a camp for the wristbands so if you want to embed some textile electronics with them is a German company called Karl Grimm and they even started making what they called Leonische Gespinste in the late 1800s and they're continuing this industry of e-textile production. And I wanted to just mention two projects that are starting to that are looking taking a look at this kind of history of electronics and textiles and one is Stitching Worlds by Irene Porsche and Ebru Kurbach. It's a really nice publication that came out with it and they produced an embroidered computer but they also looked into a bit of who is making these materials that they're working with what were they made for previously. And another work that also came out as is a book recently by Daniela Rosner called Critical Fabulations where she looks at the what we're known as the Little Old Lady's LOL weavers who wove the core memory for the Apollo space mission. And so this was a process of weaving wires through magnetized beads so if you wanted to program a program that was going to run on this space mission it would be kind of hard coded into this woven structure. And so this idea of textiles and electronics these textile techniques and electrical circuitry coming together is yeah not so new. So those were the materials and a bit about their past. A bit about myself my name is Hannah printer Wilson and I've been kind of maybe becoming an e-textile tailor for the past 13 years and in this time I've also collaborated a lot with Mika Satomi and a lot of the work that I'm going to show in the presentation was done together with her under the name Koba Kant. So as an e-textile tailor you spend a lot of your time embroidering circuits. This is a speaker coil that I'm couching down onto a piece of fabric and I think what got me into e-textiles was I was not so much interested in technology I studied industrial design and I happened to take a course on sensor technologies and the instructor Laurent Mignon showed us how we could assemble our own pressure sensors by layering aluminum foil electrodes with a piece of velo statin between and this moment of realization that I could actually I was understanding what was happening that we were able to make like a force sensing resistor and that I could customize these kind of interface elements and that I could make them out of less common materials and I could use knowledge that I had from growing up working with with textiles to make my own electronic components and circuitry and as I was preparing this talk I started to think about what it means to be an e-textile tailor and before I talked quite a bit about the properties of the materials that they can conduct and resist and they have tensile strength and I was thinking what are these what would be the properties that I would say now that an e-textile tailor should have and I think one property that's good to have if you want to work with e-textiles is that you should also be conductive and I guess on the one hand I do mean to be electrically conductive and it's quite interesting actually and I think we don't think about it enough but our bodies also conduct electricity we've got water inside ourselves and salt and the reason we can handle a lot of these things with our bodies is because we have this really nice layer of resistive skin so these three to five volt electronic circuits that I work with if I didn't have the skin to protect my innards they would actually be quite dangerous currents but I also think it's good to be conductive to ideas and to be curious about how things work if you want to be an e-textile tailor and then another so I thought of three things and the one was you should be conductive and then the other one was that I think you should be a bit romantic if you want to work with e-textiles and spend so much time in the studio working with materials and maybe you shouldn't take yourself too seriously so to be romantic and conductive and then also to be critical and to be aware of maybe why you're able to do what you do so for me my experiences in this field have been very much ones of like creative expression and empowerment because I could do things myself but I also realize that a lot of the things that I use in my practice are made by people who are not so lucky the whole electronics industry and is built up on some of this exploitation of labor and things so what I would like to do now is to talk about some of these projects that I've worked on over the last years but before I do that I want to see if I can get these to work okay it's good so let's see it's going on the time so I was thinking maybe I would need to adjust these a bit okay so I'm going to talk about these the last kind of 10 13 years of my project work a bit with an analogy of a romantic not maybe not a romantic relationship but just a relationship so how did I meet these materials I met them through my first project which I worked on together with Mika and so maybe actually kind of our our gateway drug to e-tech sales was massage so we really wanted to get back massages and maybe you know it when you ask someone for a massage they they might say yes because they feel bludge but then they'll massage for a few minutes and won't last very long and we were observing though that gamers had no problem doing quite similar motions um with their game controllers sitting there for hours on end playing these games so we thought it was a logical thing to combine the two and we built game controllers that require you to massage the back of somebody else it's called massage me unfortunately the video is very small but you can see them in action we hacked a playstation one controllers and so we knew that we wanted to have the game controls on the back of the person so we also knew we didn't want to have anything hard just the textile material there and so that was the reason why we started looking into e-tech sales and how we could solve the the interface and it worked out very well as a as a game controller people really were motivated to play the game and to massage people but as receiving as a recipient end of the massage it was not the best massage ever and here you can see some a bit of the insides of the massage me vests and so in the end we it was a pretty simple hack we extended the buttons from the controller directly into the fabric we didn't even know about conductive thread at the time so we were still using wires going to these patches of conductive fabric and but in the process of making these jackets we did discover a lot more other materials and possibilities so these are some like textile sensors that we developed following this massage me introduction and this was maybe a phase in the relationship where you're kind of you have a crush and everything's exciting and you try out a lot of different things so these are little demos of like knit sensors that are knit with a stainless steel yarn or resistive pieces of fabric making our own touch pads some capacitive too many sensors going on from more these small like sensor explorations into making more kind of actual projects here i made a whole quilt with a lot of tilt sensors on it so basically beads dangling and when they touch contacts you can kind of sense the orientation um similar to here in these in these bracelets or this is a kind of recent thing i actually made based on an old idea was to uh have a like a pressure touch pad on your whole arm so making it all out of stretchy materials so you can have kind of like sleeve that senses you touching yourself and down here on the left data glove so just being able to capture positions of your hand yeah so this was like the fun phase of exploring and discovering all these possibilities and getting ideas and making projects and yeah what do you what do you do when you're often you you've met someone and you're happy and you're in love is you also want to tell other people about it and so quite early on we already started publishing our work on a website that we called how to get what you want and it's we've continued using it over the years and every time we work on the project we often break it down into small things and post them here on this website but we didn't want to just be interacting with the community online um and mika in 2013 organized the first e-textile summer camp which maybe is not too similar from the camp here with the idea that it brings together people practicing in the field to hang out exchange ideas share our skills and as part of the e-textile summer camp i started organizing a swatch book exchange where everyone could submit a design of their own and you would make multiples of it and you would come to camp and we would mount them into these swatch books so that everyone could go home and have actual physical samples of other people's work which when you're working with these materials and if I look at other documentation online just having video and imagery is not enough to convey a lot of the technique that goes into making these things and there's a website that goes along with them so everyone documents on this website what they've contributed to the exchange and so then kind of coming into this relationship at some point you need to you've gotten to know each other the excitement is over you need to also kind of make a living and if you want to stay together for longer so this is a project that I did as one of my first commissions to make an open-source robot skin for an open-source robot arm that looked like this and the idea was to emulate human skin but as a first step we tried to just similar to the sleeve I showed before in the video but for the robot arm to construct out of layers of non-conductive and conductive fabrics like a pressure matrix so this was like the flesh layer that had rows of conductive threads sewn into it then there was a piezo-resistive sock that went over and then there was a skin layer with the columns and so when you squeeze at the points between the rows and columns rubbing my leg when these videos you see the robot arm and yeah what was just then very difficult was to distinguish between the arm itself moving or the arm touching an external object so on the left you see the arm twitching a little bit and on the right you see me handling it and then on the back you see a bit of a pressure map of the of the skin itself but yeah so this was a project that I did as a commission for someone else and that's also been a part of my practice to realize things for other people in exchange for money so that I can sustain other things that don't make money yeah and then we were quite deep into working with e-textiles and I think it kind of came that we started thinking about what tools would make this working with the materials more more fluid more natural rather than knitting something getting at your multimeter clipping it on measuring the resistance what if you could actually measure that resistance while you were knitting or in this case crocheting so this is a handle that I built for my crochet hook where the metal of the hook works as one electrode and this is the handle and at the other end of the handle there's a little like a pad that I can clip on with an alligator clip and then I have these two probes and I can crochet and it has a little display on it tell me the resistance reading that I have and then it has a little thumb potentiometer so I can adjust the voltage divider that I'm building together with the resistive material to get different sensitivities so that was one tool another tool that we built came because we noticed we were working quite a lot with optic fiber and shining LEDs into this optic fiber to illuminate it and make different projects and every time we made a project like this we ended up coming with some other weird custom solution for mounting that led directly at the end of the optic fiber so we we some point sat down and said let's let's come up with a more like solution that we could use over and over again and the best solution we could come up with where these kind of bumblebee like connectors so we were using addressable LEDs so you have the in ground data in data out and we actually kind of mounted this we broke out the circuit from the led and mounted it around the tube that you can then also like couple to the optic fiber and while it was such a nice solution they were so elaborate to make it took maybe 10 minutes to make one of these so we started thinking about how we could edit the design and make it something more mass-manufacturable and this was one of the first prototypes that led to an idea that using kind of traditional pcb manufacturing technique but what if we actually manufactured the pcb from the side kind of went back again no so we kind of manufactured from the side and then we kind of flip the pcb back up again and we get these nice valleys that we can like sew into with the conductive threads and so it took me a while to learn key cad and translate that idea into something i could send off for and then last year we got the first batch of them and it was surprising the first batch had no mistakes and they worked it's not a very simple it's just a breakout board but some of the tolerances were quite small at some points and so they work and i actually have some with me if you would like to use some and i also have some optic fiber one idea would be to do a bit of a workshop with wristbands that you get for camp use that as the controller to control some of these we call them the lulu board and make some light up elements on your wristband so this was just a small demo to show and it's also nice if you shine for me there and you can mix colors in the fiber okay so coming back to this relationship analogy we have gotten to the point where we were making some tools to kind of sustain our practice to kind of work through like repetitive issues in the relationship it should be a video oh well there was a then i think then came a point where we got a bit delusion disillusioned or it got a bit bumpy the ride with e-textiles we started um becoming more aware of these things that we were designing in this kind of small-scale diy arts um contexts we're actually starting to make their ways out into the world and wearable technology was becoming something that was not so far off and futuristic but uh companies were looking to really manufacture and on a larger scale and we didn't see so much thought going into what's actually going to happen when these materials go out into the world without thinking yet about how what what effects they will have in the environment and what means we might have to maybe have more of a circular economy with them and so in 2012 me can i we commissioned ourselves to produce a fictional commission set in the future uh which was to make a morning gown and we called it the crying dress and for us it was a first i think project where we were thinking about this future of the future of craftsmanship but also the future of um these materials making their way out into the world um and i don't at that time we didn't know that um six years later we would actually open a tailor shop to kind of do more of a real enactment of this idea of what it could mean for technology to be custom made and handcrafted um rather than something you buy in the shop and so for the last so 2017-18 we really had a tailor shop in berlin on the girlitza park it was uh two big rooms one was more a display and showroom where people could come in and see what's possible and what the materials are and another room that was the workshop where we would work to realize these things that people did actually come in and order from us yeah so this is a bit of what it was like in the workshop we had a price list that was um not based on any realistic exchange of value for what we made because we didn't want it to be about can i afford to have this it was more about what idea can i even have an idea of something i would like to have so we got funding actually to support our labor time in the in the project and the price list was actually more of a token uh to have this exchange and and to maybe cover some of the materials that we used and so in total we were open for a whole year and in that year 14 people came to us and they had ideas for things that they wanted and we realized them and this is just some of them and of these 14 people quite a few of them had um wanted something that would light up or would sense uh their body and i wanted to go through one of the commissions in a bit more detail and this is boris he's uh he plays posaune trombone in a in a street music band and in the band they've started to add led lights their instruments and so on and so when he walked by our shop he made this connection and uh decided that he would like to commission a costume for his himself to wear in his marching band so we started off making sketches of what this costume be what um anforderungen requirements are there in terms of like wearability and and robustness and in the end we uh decided on a kind of vest that's asymmetrical and so from that decision based on the sketches we start making a mock-up in what's called a twal so like a cheap um fabric that we can use to prototype and parallel to that we kind of prototype the electronics part which in this part was going to be an led strip and we actually ended up making kind of basically our own neopixel strips where we could have custom spacing um and then we could mount these strips in a kind of snake-like pattern so the led light doesn't shine directly out but shines kind of sideways out from these little crevices and at the time someone had brought us an old like a street worker sleeve off the street uh made out of this orange material and we decided to make as much of the vest as possible out of this sleeve to make it orange and underneath the vest he wears a corset with a little knit stretch sensor so when he breathes in the vest lights up and as he breathes out through playing the trombone the light diminishes and so this was a almost final fitting with Ben who came in to help us with pattern making um and we're fitting it on Boris and then this was if there's sound you can hear him play as well but yeah he's playing the trombone and you can see the lights light up and go off if it's possible to get sound could turn it on but it's okay sorry thank you um okay so now I presented quite a few projects as if almost like me this e-tech style tailor uses these materials to have ideas and to put them out into the world and I started to think or become a bit more aware though like of what is actually happening in this process that's a bit of a bit of design a bit of material science a bit of electrical engineering what is this relationship between me and the materials that I'm working with and this kind of feeling started to turn more and more into an idea that maybe there is something more happening and it's just not just my ideas and me translating them into objects and putting them out into the world but I think also the materials are trying to tell me something and so earlier this year I decided to break rule number eight which says don't try to analyze and create at the same time these are two different processes and I embarked on a month long kind I gave myself a month to explore a new material thermochromic pigment which is a pigment that changes color at a temperature and I just kind of explored it mixing it with different other materials applying it to materials finding ways to heat it up and while I was doing this exploration I was taking a lot of notes and I was making samples of everything that I was making and then at the end I went back and I looked over everything and I made this kind of stop motion animation that's almost like a time lapse of how these ideas and possibilities unfolded for me and I think I recognized four things that I'd not really been aware about at all in all of my practice the last years and that is that first one was that I think I'm following the materials much more of the time than I think it's when I sit down to work with something new I'm very much if it's going to be a good process I think I need to be good at listening to what the material what properties it has what is it good at it's not my idea doesn't just come from anywhere it's coming out of this engagement with the material and that's maybe the second thing is that these things I end up making are very much embedded or connected to the properties of these materials and a third thing was that I'm really not very skilled at actually transitioning between this thinking about things that I want to do and then actually making them I spend a lot of time just sitting around kind of trying to make that jump back and forth between I have an idea and I want to try it and then actually trying it and then I'm trying things but I know I need I know I'm trying to I'm coming up with ideas but then how to articulate these ideas so first thing was that I'm following the materials a lot of the time second one was that a lot of the stories that I tell are actually coming from the materials a third thing was that I'm not very skilled at going back and forth between this abstract thinking and material making and the fourth one was that I I really started to appreciate this value of community in any kind of making process because when you go off just by yourself coming up with things and making them it can be very alluring like you I find like I can get very lost in that process and it can be very nice feeling like you just keep trying things out and you get somewhere but then at the end you can also feel often very lost and you need other people or you want other people to tell you that what you're doing is making sense or and to other people to see what you've done and comment and and to have some kind of connection back to this reality in which you're embedded in and so after noticing these four things I started to think back over my projects and one project started to stick out to me and that was in 2016 I got to do a residency at Autodesk has this big machine shop in San Francisco called Pier 9 and it's you get 24-hour access to all these kind of five access mills and like laser cutters and 3d printers and it's it's kind of an impressive space to be allowed to work in and they also offer courses to learn how to use all of the software to control the machines and so yeah I spent time learning to 3d model and to generate toolpaths for for milling machines and using waterjet cutters to I cast iron rods and resin and cut off small slices my 3d printed speaker coils with a conductive silver paste I used the shot bot which is a big CNC mill to mill out rings with holes in them and then sewed them together with rope but all this time that I was working with these machines I I noticed myself really missing this more hands-on encounter with the materials working with my hands and in the sewing space at Pier 9 there's like a it's a nice sewing table and on the sewing table there's a box with just straight Taylor's pins so something like this and I and I was just started playing with these pins and I would poke them through materials this is a from the encyclopedia Adam Smith who analyzed the kind of process of the division of labor took the pin factory as actually the example upon which to base his analysis and so I was starting to look at these pins as these very like minimalistic but also very beautiful representations of of what a tool is so a pin has like one end that is sharp it's intended for the material and it has another end that's not sharp that's intended for the maker and and all these other tools I was working with even though maybe I was sitting on a computer using more complex software to control an end mill milling into some wood it was kind of be nicely represented by this pin thought and so these are some of these pin explorations of poking pin through different materials using starting to use the pin as a material and not only as a tool I have to hurry up a bit too my time is running running low but now I have to click through all of them I even started thinking about yeah what happens if the pin flips around and points towards me and then I started um coming up with this idea for like a dangerous skin that could be this 3d printed structure with pins in it that would all poke into the body but then um something happened and I was in the studio one morning and I was it was early and I was in a rush and I had this pin cushion on my hand with my pins in it and I just pulled off my sweater over this pin cushion and one of the pins went into my hand okay so it stayed in my hand for quite some time because it took me a while to get an appointment to actually do the operation to take it out again but this whole process really got me thinking about this um like what had to happen there was it really that the pin had flipped and that had gone the wrong way or was it more that me and maybe the pin had it actually changed place and that I am also a material so this whole separation between me talking about these materials as if they were something separate is not such a good way of speaking maybe this works so they did manage to cut the pin out but um I did go back and have more x-rays taken afterwards and it looks like actually the pin is still in there and it has started to multiply the end so this last great Hannah thank you for your fantastic uh nice handle let me see it actually it's oh yeah it's still there I'm sorry guys we have a couple of minutes for a Q&A um there are a couple of mics one second here in the front it's really still there I can see it do you want to explain to us how the leggings work um how do you think they work I actually don't really have a clue unless it's maybe a stretch sensor is in there okay no it's a nice question so when I was putting on the leggings you saw in the background there was a video playing that was actually the process of making the leggings which was only two weeks ago that I made them um I've been working with some friends to polymerize our own conductive fabrics so this everything that is black here on the fabric is a conductive but it has this property that when you squeeze it or you stretch it it becomes more conductive and we're still trying to figure out exactly why that is if it's the conductive layers that are around the loops in the fabric being pulled taut or it's actually a compression of that polymerized layer through it being stretched or squeezed um but what was really nice was to discover that this polymerization process worked perfectly to do things like tie-dye or boutique so traditional textile techniques where you create a resist on the fabric so in this case I was wrapping it up and I made little marbles in it and everywhere where the string is it didn't manage to polymerize and so underneath these leggings I'm wearing some very nice-looking skin colored leggings where I've sewn conductive fabric in and this is like the the electrodes or the the terminals where I'm measuring the change in resistance across so behind my my knees all right so and also the question yes thank you it was fantastic isn't it were you planning to do a workshop you said you mentioned something like that yes so together with julian actually um in the what's the name of the badge the badge tent so there will be a workshop with when so um we don't know yet we will announce it on twitter and mouse it on over the badge account okay and there will be at least one workshop on sewing conductive thread into the wristband of the badge and and attaching it to the badge and doing nice stuff okay super I see a question at that site isn't it no someone else with a question are there in the audience out yeah um yes to the left yeah um there is someone sorry do you have any e-textile clothing that you're wearing in your everyday life that's a good question and I think this is one a first step in um for answer would be no so it's more like arts project but it's not because I don't want it to be it's more that I struggle to come up with things that I need in my life okay and that I could make and then also to find the time to make them well enough that they don't break so I've quite often quickly made myself bike lights um to to wear but they've not lasted for long enough all right thank you okay there was one question on the internet there yes um do you think that um wearable like electronics will always be have to be made for one person in mind or do you think it will be scalable enough that like one piece of clothing can be used by different people I definitely think it's scalable um I think more my interest in this tailor made customized version of it is because I already see industry doing the mass production um trying to figure it out to make something that a lot of people can wear but I don't see so much happening on the other end of custom made stuff so we wanted to explore this idea of if there was a tailor shop like the kooba on your street do you even have an idea for something yourself that you don't go to media mac to buy but you actually have to also have that idea of course thank you for sharing your ideas and your experiences with us um for last time guys oh there was another question one last question okay one last one please hurry up it's one but last you mentioned the future of the individual garments and that gets me wondering what's the state of the art for um doing e-textiles that don't just become toxic e-waste when people are done with them are you exploring that or do you know of anyone who is um very nice question I think it's bound up in a more the same discussion with the whole fashion textile industry itself looking at how how things that people buy that are textile and also e-waste and electronics waste and yeah making the the producers more responsible for the things that they put out into the world um that's yeah that they make things more more fixable that they're also willing to fix them themselves um I think I think the solutions I've heard of that seem most good to me go along these lines of not just thinking of like okay how can we make it separatable afterwards and and recyclable but actually also that the product itself has a longer life that we that we get away also from this idea of buying something and not using it for so long but the things that you have you use for longer and maybe you can fix them yourselves and let's hope so yes one last question I'll give you my mind do you also have some clothes for um surveillance defending for the face for example um I don't but could be could be very interesting to in in general masks are for surveillance like a mask is a wearable for the face and then that almost in itself is a so I have made some masks for not for necessarily just surveillance purposes anti surveillance purposes but can I add to that because I'm also part of the program committee there's a talk by Adam Harvey on Friday about exactly that topic so you want to check that out for exactly that sort of topic for surveillance circumvention via facial modification great guys um give a warm applause again to uh Pusea and you great and uh well check out Macedon or Twitter for the workshop though to be announced I'm looking forward yeah we'll see you there as well thank you thanks guys