'Sensing Textures: Tactile Resistance is a collection of eight swatches comprised of e-textile sensors and actuators that probe ideas around the politics of crafting handmade technological artifacts. By engaging hands-on with the production of these artifacts, this work aims to reflect on alternative modes of world-building that allow for speculation about how bespoke technology can look and feel like when it is highly personalized. These eight swatches explore different crafting techniques while responding to personal narratives, questions about how we perceive the world and how we embody the making of technology collectively in a critical manner.'
This work was the result of the Wearable Narratives DRG (Directed-Research Group) that was organized by Afroditi Psarra during the Spring 2021 quarter. The group consisted of Esteban Yosef Agosin (DXARTS), Grace Barar (HCDE / DXARTS), Rylie Sweem (HCDE / DXARTS), Xintong Xu (Japanese Studies / DXARTS), Ruoxi Song (Art IVA / DXARTS), Zoe Grace Kaputa (Computer Science), and Sadaf Sadri (Art Photomedia), and was meeting once a week remotely on Zoom. The meetings included a series of discussions, guest lectures, and hands-on experiments with e-textiles and soft-circuit techniques, all documented on the DXARTS Softlab blog, and compiled into a webzine format.
'Sensing Textures: Tactile Resistance' was featured at the ISWC '21 Design Exhibition, was published as an Extended Abstract at the conference proceedings, and is now available through the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.