Project Presentation
The DareDroid is a biomechanic cocktail making dress that uses medical technology, customized hardware and human temperament to provide you with a freshly made cocktail. The human host and robotic dress work together to provide you with a cocktail in exchange for a game of “Truth or Dare”. The robotic performance playfully transgresses and explores human interaction in public spaces and inverts the normal social experience by asking people to reveal personal information.
Sensors around the model’s neck detect your presence and allows the technological system to dispense non-alcoholic liquid. Your willingness to play a touch screen based game of Truth or Dare, combined with your natural charm triggers the decision to give you more than just juice. LED’s on the robotic dress indicates your proximity to the human host, and if you breach her intimate space the system shuts down. Play the game, and be rewarded.
The Modern Nomads (MoNo) – the team behind DareDroid – is comprised of a hacker, a fashion designer, and a sculptor. Anouk Wipprecht is a Dutch fashion-tech designer who uses electronics in her designs. Marius Kintel is a hacker, tinkerer, and engineer based in Vienna and at the Metalab. Jane Tingley is a Montreal based artist who works with sculpture, responsive installation, and sound.
Technology
The technology for mixing the cocktail and controlling the fluids is based on the hardware and software developed earlier at V2_Lab, during Anouk Wipprecht’s summer residency Pseudomorphs.
The dress has two levels of responsiveness – the first level is externally triggered, as the sensors built into the dress will give it “a mind of its own”. The dress responds to people based on proximity using the rules of proxemics introduced by Edward T Hall in 1966, which measures the distance between intimate space (0 – 18 inches or 0 – 46 cm) and personal space (1.5 – 4 feet – 46 cm – 120 cm). The developers used these distances to create rules that define interaction, so if the viewer enters the models intimate space, the technological system will shut down preventing any liquid from being dispensed. However if the viewer remains within the personal space, or at a respectful distance s/he will activate the dispensation of a non-alcohol containing liquid. Once the liquid has been put into the cup, the viewer is then invited to an touch phone based game of Truth or Dare. If the participant completes the game, the model will then choose to add the alcohol into the drink. If the player refuses to play the game, then he or she will be given just the juice.
The DareDroid series started during a residency at Quartier21/MQ in Vienna September 2010 by Anouk Wipprecht and Jane Tingley. The previous DareDroid 1.0 dress (Cocktailmaking robot dress) got presented during RoboExotica in Vienna/Austria, a festival for cocktailmaking robots.
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Anouk Wipprecht (NL) is a fashion designer. She is fascinated by the idea of having both a physical and a psychological relationship with a garment.
Anouk started her fashion education at the age of 14. Her interest in fashion lies in exploring the extent to which we experience fashion (emotional, intellectual and sensual aspects) and how we might be able to accomplish a higher state of connectivity between the body and our clothing. By specializing herself in fashion & technology she started to create little stories about a world where people are looking for both a physical as a psychological connection with their garments, and to design towards this feeling by combining different platforms that can trigger our behavior.
Through this fascination she started experimenting with combining fashion and technology 3 years ago by attending workshops, and moved for a year to Sweden for the study “body, fashion & technology” at the Malmo university where she worked on Arduino-based application possibilities and smart fabric concepting. Later on she gained deeper knowledge of the fashiontech field by assisting Sabine Seymour in Vienna, Austria. In 2010, she graduated at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, where she collaborated with Aduen Darriba (interaction designer) on the project Technosensual.
In collaboration with Studio Roosegaarde and V2_Lab, Anouk worked on Intimacy Black. She was an Artist-in-Resident during the V2_ Summer Sessions 2010, and she developed The Birds installation for the Re:visie film festival (2010).
Dutch based designer Anouk Wipprecht is a rising star in the emerging field of “fashionable technology”; a rare combination of sartorial knowhow combined with engineering smarts and style, she has in a very short period created an impressive body of tech-enhanced designs bringing together fashion and technology in an unusual way. She creates technological couture; with background in fashion design combined with engineering, science and interaction design, she creates systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligence; projected as ‘host’ systems on the human body, her designs move, breath, and react to the environment around them.
Above from her tremendous technical skills is her ability to craft a unique sartorial style for herself. Part futuristic, part anime-meets-high fashion, her aesthetics are set apart from more utilitarian wearables (which are all about function) and can be considered artistic creations in themselves. Many of her designs have been exhibited in exhibitions as well as fashion events. In Anouk’s designs the technology creates the aesthetics as opposed to simply enhancing a function which is hidden. Keen on showing the nuts and bolts of the garments (often the valves and mechanisms are displayed on the outside) we witness the designs creating their own unique forms of interaction, movement and meaning.
She seeks to create a ‘higher connectivity between the body and clothing’ by investigating the extent to which we experience fashion (emotionally, intellectual and sensual levels) in a physical and psychological way wherein what we wear responds to us, and also affects due to what we wear. Producing something more than just the traditional function of coverture and adornment; what results is one-of-a-kind, architectural, avant-garde garments with bold silhouettes, vested with circuitry and a regalia of plastic tubes, fluids or smart foils and the ability to respond in an unique and remarkable way to human bodies.
