Wearable Facade

A project by Ricardo O'Nascimento

iMAL invites Rotterdam-based artist Ricardo O'Nascimento and his Wearable Facade project for a workshop and urban performance on smart garments and generative patterns.

Wearable Facade is an apparel that captures the colours and shapes of its environment through micro-cameras, and translates them into computer-generated patterns displayed on its LED surface. Walking through the city, the Wearable Facade can reflect surrounding architecture, or "replay" patterns recorded in different areas of Brussels or Europe.

Wearable Facade takes its inspiration from the increasingly numerous "media facades" that appear in cities across the globe; those LED-covered buildings that turn architecture into screens. Wearable Facade appropriates the idea, and applies it to fashion design, into a smaller-scaled, more mobile and accessible device.

iMAL will invite (fashion) designers, digital artists and students to a workshop led by the Wearable Facade team (Ricardo O'Nascimento & Erik Overmeire). Together, they will investigate the neighbourhood and create generative patterns that translate the urban environment into graphics.. The idea is to look at the city from another perspective, try to retrieve its essence and convey it in terms of colours and shapes.

The workshop will be followed by a Wearable Facade performance/walk in the Dansaert area. An unusual experience for the passers-by, who will get the chance to discuss with the artist and learn more about the project.

Schedule

• 24, 25 September : Workshop
• 26 September : Public performances at 13:00 & 18:30 (start in front of iMAL)

Workshop

The workshop is open to programmers, fashion designers, graphic designers, art students and creative people ready to work in teams.

Registration is mandatory

About the artists

Ricardo O'Nascimento is an artist and researcher on the field of new media and interactive art. He investigates body-environment relations focused on interface development for worn devices, interactive installations and hybrid environments. He is the founder of POPKALAB - a design/research studio focused on innovation on the field of wearable technology.

He holds degree from PUC - SP , SENAC - SP and the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz at the Interface Culture Department. Currently he works in his studio and teaches at some places.

He receive awards including CYNETART award 2012 and Rumos Arte Cibernética. His works have been featured in several museums, galleries and art festivals like Ars Electronica, FILE, LABoral, V2, Instituto Itaú Cultural, Soft Galleri, Transmediale and MAC - Coruña, among others.

Erik Overmeire is a media artist working with robotics and virtual, artificial or non-human intelligence that expand into the physical realm, machine-human-nature - interaction. He is interested in the, often now, blurred distinction between nature and machine and explores the area of the machine as an augmentation of nature and the other way around - nature as an extension of machine; a space and no-space between nature and machine; and the tensions between nature and the machine. In his work he utilises and hacks tools such as openCV, wide arrays of electronics (arduinos, environmental sensors), Kinect camera and he often writes and apply code for generative visuals and sound, vision systems, feedback loop interaction and that way he plays with the concept of primitive form of consciousness and self-consciousness.

He holds BA from Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and he worked and collaborated with institutions like Worm (Rotterdam) and Baltan Laboratories (Eindhoven) and artists such as Geert Mul among many others. Also he works as the main developer for Popkalab in Rotterdam.

Practical Info

Performances
26 September
13:00 & 18:30
Location: Rue Dansaert, Rue de Flandre, St-Catherine
(start in front of iMAL)

Subject to change in case of rain!

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Credits

Wearable Facade is commissioned by Urbane Künste Ruhr in the framework of Connecting Cities.
With the support of the Culture Programme 2007-2013 of the European Union.

Wearable Facade is presented in Brussels by iMAL, in the framework of In/Visible City 2015 and Design September 2015.

Thanks: fo.am, Wendy Van Wynsberghe