Find my new open acces article on fashion and technology in the latest issue of Popular Inquiry.
Fashion and Technology
My working hypothesis is that the fields of fashion and wearables are most advanced when it comes to developing devices that are integrated in everyday objects. Designers are pioneers with regard to ubiquitous computing and infrastructural intelligence. But there is yet another point that turns fashion and more specific digital skins into an interesting field of research: The close proximity to the user’s body. Digital skin tend to merge artificial and biological life. They allow artificial limbs to sense their surroundings and they might soon be able to enhance human senses through adding artificial sense organs to the biological setup. The intertwining of artificial and biological sensing alters deeply the social and material structures of our life-worlds. In this paper, I will propose a phenomenological concept to describe technological key features and understand their impact on human life. My aim is to generalize the idea of digital skin under the Merleau-Pontian term of the flesh and propose a hybrid concept of the digital flesh as paradigmatic for future technologies.
Leave A Comment