2016 / Sessilia
Part of the Haute Filtrage collection, a wearable tech collaboration between Gregory Phillips and textile designer Wendy Ng, Haute Filtrage is Toronto's contribution to Subtle Technologies Festival 2016: Seamless Visions.
This encrusting array of apertures is inspired by the cellular structure of many marine organisms, including corals and sea sponges. The apertures or pores are an organism's main point of interfacing with the environment: This is their filtering system, consuming and excreting resources and collecting information in the process. This structure is repeated throughout the plant and animal kingdoms, right down to the microscopic level.
The 3D pattern was created via parametric modelling using Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper, based on a Voronoi algorithm that populates a given area (in this case, the 2D pattern of the collar panels) with a pseudo-random network of interconnected openings that vary in shape, size, and height based on their position within the populated field. The panels were 3D printed via Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) in thermoplastic elastomer (TPE), a soft rubber suitable for textile integration or potential textile substitution. The printing was executed using relatively low resolution (0.3 mm layer height) to exaggerate the artifacts of the additive manufacturing process-- i.e., the stacked layers indicative of something that has been grown, rather than built.
The wearer’s body becomes the substrate that this 3D printed organism attaches to, in the form of a collar and chest plate of a tunic. Metallic chiffon was used on the tunic to amplify the softness and alienistic aesthetic of the prints. The 3D models were converted into 2D vector lines in various perspective views to compose the RGB patterns that was digitally printed on the billowing cotton/organza pants.
Haute Filtrage posits:
Filters are vital to our digitally mediated lives: In a landscape bombarded by signals, filters help us see the forest for the trees. Filters can block or boost information, obscure or enhance, authenticate or discredit. Can our clothing be a filter for the body? For our identity? Who is applying the filter, and who decides what is kept and what is lost? How do filters challenge our everyday perception? Using augmented reality and digital manufacturing, including 3D printing and textile design, the project aims to explore the implications of the filtered body within the public (surveillor) and private (surveilled) realms.
