Adorn and Subvert: A Discussion on Wearable Resistance

About

Moderated by writer Joanne McNeil, this discussion focuses on fashion accessories and garments that counter oppression, harassment, and surveillance through technology and speculative design. Forms of violence like state oppression or street harassment become increasingly high-tech, controlling the movement, privacy, and safety of bodies in unprecedented ways. How might clothing and adornment become the first line of resistance and a way to shift the power dynamic?

Panelists: Lisa Kori Chung, Iltimas Doha and Adam Harvey.

Entering Parsons New School of Design in the fall, Iltimas Doha took a gap year to be an Eyebeam Student Resident and to work with emerging technologies with the goal of creating more meaningful experiences in classrooms all around the world.  He is currently working on a hoodie that could be used as a tool to protect youth from police harassment. Read about his project here.

Lisa Kori Chung is an artist, creative producer and researcher working in the realms of sound, performance, and the future of fashion. As a 2010-2011 Watson Fellow, she documented various communities that formed around technologically-based art practices. This interest in collaboration and community building, as well as bridging different forms of knowledge, has continued throughout her projects. These include Open Fit (with Kyle McDonald), an open source clothing workflow that brings pattern making knowledge into the Processing environment, Opera Toolkit (with Gene Kogan and Colin Self), open source audiovisual tools to spur new approaches to narrative and staging in multimedia performance, and Anti-NIS Accessories (with Caitlin Morris), speculative wearables to counteract future brain scanning surveillance.

Adam Harvey is an artist and technologist exploring the impacts of surveillance technology. His work imagines new ways of adapting to a world of total surveillance through design and fashion. Harvey's past projects include CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection; Stealth Wear, camouflage from thermal cameras, and the OFF Pocket, a faraday cage phone case. He is the founder of the Privacy Gift Shop, an ecommerce site for countersurveillance art and privacy accessories; teaches at New York University; and is an inaugural member at NEW INC, New Museum's art/tech incubator.

Joanne McNeil is a writer interested in the ways that technology is shaping art, politics, and society. She was recently a Resident at Eyebeam, and is a 2015 fellow at the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, recipient of the Arts Writing Fellowship Award to an emerging writer in digital arts. She is a contributing writer/editor for The Message, the technology-focused opinion magazine published by Medium. She is collaborating on the Digital Media and Learning Competition’s Trust Challenge award winning proposal to develop workshops for building private networks. She is currently writing a book on privacy and internet culture. She writes about things like broken iPhones, virtual assistants in airports, the Chelsea Manning trial, and the future of novels

Eyebeam is a partner of South Street Seaport's Culture District