As we become more and more dependent upon technology, there are a growing number of people who are keen to show us the pitfalls of our love affair with black screens. This dress-turned-visual metaphor is another example of someone trying to get us to all stop looking at our iPhones and focus upon the REAL world, as it makes itself more transparent with every tweet the wearer sends out.
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The “x.pose” dress, created by New York University’s Pedro Oliveira and Xuedi Che, is more of a sculpture than an actual dress, albeit a wearable one. It’s made out of a 3D printed frame with a small computer situated on its back, that wirelessly communicates with your smartphone in order to track your use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The more you use these sites, the more revealing the dress becomes, thanks to it being composed of a reactive material that turns transparent when an electric current passes through it. This electric current is triggered by the wearer’s phone usage.
The x.pose is intended to make us think about how much of ourselves we put online. Speaking of the reasoning behind its creation, Che said:” By participating in this hyper-connected society while having little to no control of my digital data production, how much of myself do I unknowingly reveal? To what degree does the aggregated metadata collected from me paint an accurate portrait of who I am as a person? What aspects of my individuality are reflected in this portrait?
“x.pose is my exploration of these questions. Since I have already ceded control of my data, I wanted to go a step further and broadcast it for anyone and everyone to see.”
Watch the video detailing x.pose below.
Header Image: x.pose
