| Date: | Friday, February 11, 2022 |
| Time: | 11:00-13:00 |
| Place: | Online (Zoom-link will be sent by mail after registration) |
| Registration: | By mail to secretary, Jeanet Dal at dal@sdu.dk - before February 1st - 2022 When registration please provide your full name, email adress, affiliation and which course you are signing up for. |
| Opponent: | Dr. Oscar Tomico Plasencia |
| ECTS: | 0 |
Creating and Staging Interactive Costumes –
Integrating Wearables and E-textiles in the Performing Arts
[working title]
Interactive costumes are technology-enhanced stage clothing responsive to their wearers or the environment, e.g. a tutu with embedded light that reacts to a dancer’s motion. Although this type of costume has considerable potential for performance and costume design, interactive costumes are still rarely used by performances that seek to work out innovative ways of narrative expression and artistic statement (e.g. in theatre, ballet or opera). Likewise, the research on interactive costumes is an under-explored area.
This doctoral research aims at identifying what facilitates the integration of interactive costumes in the performing arts, without claiming that every performance production needs to integrate them. To arrive at a holistic perspective, I draw on Niklas Luhmann’s system theory to guide the investigations on interactive costumes on three levels – the object, social and time dimension. These address the characteristics of interactive costumes’ creation and deployment (object dimension); the perception of and impacts on wearers and other types of stakeholders, e.g. choreographers, lighting designers or stage technicians (social dimension); and the temporal structures required for the processes behind interactive costumes (time dimension).
This research project engages with interactive costuming through 10 case studies and 13 expert interviews. These qualitative inquiries are driven by an abductive approach. The case studies, conducted in varying settings, serve as a resource of first-hand experiences. The expert interviews consolidate the insights from the cases and serve as a resource to comprehensively understand interactive costume practices from a professional perspective. A meta-synthesis across the findings of the cases and the interviews completes the systemic understanding of interactive costumes.
This research and its insights across the three dimensions (object, social and time) will inform future interactive costume projects by constructing new knowledge about the processes and practices that support their integration into the performing arts context. The gathered knowledge includes a comprehensive overview of what is necessary to successfully create and stage interactive costumes for different types of performances while taking different stakeholders’ perspectives into account. The practical implications will have relevance for performance practitioners and pedagogues. The theoretical implications will contribute to a philosophy of costume and performance design specifically and, more generally, will demonstrate the relevance of a systemic perspective in design research and human-computer interaction.