DIY couture may not yet have hit the runways in Milan and Paris, but it’s alive and well in new media circles.
For her performance Cast, U-Me Intermedia MFA student Amy Pierce didn’t make her own wedding dress as much as invite others to make it for her. Her choice of material–a plaster body cast that required her to stand motionless for four hours–was a metaphor for the marriage contract that was particularly, well, “fitting.” (Like any good bride, she eventually fainted.)
Meanwhile designer Mary Huang has developed an application that turns drawings into dresses, courtesy of a handy mathematical algorithm.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/03/24/1157201/An-App-That-Turns-Any-Drawing-Into-a-Dress?from=rss via Byline
“A new app by interactive designer Mary Huang called Continuum, lets you turn any drawing into a customized three-dimensional garment. From the article: ‘Huang dubs her software “D. dress”—the “D” stands for “Delaunay triangulation,” an algorithm she uses to deconstruct each dress into a series of triangular planes. Any adjustments in necklines, skirt lengths, or sleeve types are achieved by adding or subtracting triangles. “Lo-res triangular models are more abstract,” Huang admits, “but this abstraction prompts people to imagine what the resulting dress would look like rather than expect an exact rendition of the screen image. The triangulation also insures that almost any drawing will produce an interesting form.”’”
Our company of actors and chefs will be arriving in the form of an alchemical laboratory that engages all of one’s senses through a media-rich exploration of food, music, video and theatrical performances. The University of Maine’s new Intermedia Graduate program will be launching a revolutionary collaborative effort, under the guidance of Professor Leon Johnson, where graduate students engage as designers, authors, performers, with a range of communities, to cultivate conversations with local artists, farmers, students, teachers and businesses to generate a uniquely immersive dining experience.
