Tangere

Tangere is an exploration into the sensation and haptic experience of tactility, including the perceptions of sonic vibration, movement and light through the external instrumentation of a conductive wearable garment. Typically localized to one’s individual exteroception, the perception of tactility is a phenomenon that cannot be visualized outside of the internal cerebral processes. This work attempts to visualize the haptic experience through the development of a prototypal exo-sensory device which duplicates the transmission of sensory information into a viewable secondary channel.

The device on board is a small computer capable of reading different sensory information such as temperature, acceleration, gyroscopic orientation, electro-conductivity, sound, and light. This device transforms the jacket into an intermediary sensory input, disrupting the experience which the wearer perceives and transmitting the data from the environment into different light signals via the 60 LED neopixels sewn into the sleeves.

This project was made possible in part by my instructors at Syracuse, as well as technical advice from Jordan Schilling and friend actors/models Liam Lawlor & Kevin Fraiser.

Music: Falaise - Floating Points

This video is the result of several months spent designing, prototyping, and fabricating an idea which I really didn’t think would be possible to actually execute. The garment itself is made from a non-breathable plastic shower curtain. When worn, it becomes an incidental barrier between the body of the wearer and the enviroment. This was unintentional at first, but it soon became clear that this quality of the jacket was important in dividing the tactile experiences one feels when interacting with objects, people, and various media such as water, air, and sunlight.

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