Although Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on human-artifact relations are not primarily concerned with technological artifacts (Brey 2000: 5), they are very helpful in taking the first step towards understanding the effects of techno-fashion on the wearer’s ex- perience and awareness of the body. Wipprecht’s first Plexiglas prototype of the robot- ic ‘Spider Dress 1.0’ (2012) [Figure 27] is equipped with proximity sensors that detect
movement within a distance of ten to eighty centimeters from the wearer, causing the robotic spider limbs to “coyly” dance around the wearer’s body while at the same time protecting her if someone approaches too fast or comes too close (Pakhchyan 2013). Seeing this dress in light of Merleau-Ponty’s work, it exemplifies the concept of stretch- ing the wearer’s bodily spatiality through techno-fashion. Not unlike the feathered hat, the out-thrust spider limbs change the outlines and spatiality of the wearer’s body. They not only literally extend the wearer’s body by expanding it into the surrounding space, but also inevitably influence how she navigates and comports herself in space (Negrin 2016: 14). Like Merleau-Ponty’s hatted woman has “a tacit knowledge of the location of her feather,” the wearer of ‘Spider Dress 1.0’ implicitly knows the location and dimensions of the prosthetic spider limbs (Brey 2000: 4).
With her second version of the dress, Wipprecht went even further in trying to create “an extension of the wearer’s intuition” (ibid.) or, as it would be described in phenome- nological terms, “an extension of the [wearer’s] bodily synthesis” (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 176). Like the 1.0 version, the ‘Spider Dress 2.0’ (2015) [Figure 28] is equipped with
Photography by Anna Cervinkova © Anouk Wipprecht
28. Anouk Wipprecht, ‘Spider Dress 2.0’ (2015) Photography by Jason Perry © Anouk Wipprecht
29. Anouk Wipprecht, ‘Personal space around the body‘ (2016) © Anouk Wipprecht
two proximity sensors and twenty servomotors2 that allow it to monitor and defend the wearer’s personal space. This more intricate 3D-printed version of the dress additionally contains embedded respiration sensors in the chest piece and learned threat detection to control the defensive behavior of the robotic limbs (Kaplan 2015). It combines data on the behavior of people within a seven-meter proximity, with real-time biometric signals on the wearer’s breathing. Based on pre-programmed social norms and violations the system is able to detect exactly when someone is violating the wearer’s personal space and will respond accordingly by showing twelve different states of defensive behavior. Encroachers approaching the wearer too quickly or closely are met with violently moving robotic spider limbs, that clearly tell them to “back-off” (Heleker 2015a).
Applying Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of the feathered hat and blind man’s cane to Wipprecht’s ‘Spider Dress 2.0’ provides further insight into how tech- no-fashion may affect the wearer’s embodied experiences. When asked what it feels like to wear the attention-grabbing robotic spider limbs at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2015, model Whitney Heleker responded: “I feel like it is really a part of me (…) I don’t feel any pressure points of the weight, so it’s pretty spread out and honestly pretty comfortable” (Heleker 2015b). When I asked her to elaborate on the wearability of the design, she explained that the dress was such a perfect fit because it was 3D-scanned to her body (Interview WH 2017). Firstly, this indicates how the model’s body was in- corporated the dress(Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002: 239). Rather than experiencing the 3D-printed robotic limbs as something detached and separate from her body, Heleker became so familiar with wearing them that they have started to feel like a part of her. For Wipprecht, this idea of the technology merging with the body is actually what tech- no-fashion is all about: “[i]f you wear a design that you partly control, and it partly ex- tends your agency through its autonomous actions, you start to question where you end, and my system begins” (Wipprecht 2014).
Secondly, Wipprecht’s techno-fashion epitomizes the phenomenological idea of ar- tifacts through which the user’s scope of sensorial perception is extended (Merleau- Ponty 1945/2002: 165). Enabling the wearer to perceive more than she could do in a non-technological garment, the dress demonstrates that “[t]he experience of the corpo- real schema is not fixed or delimited but extendable to the various tools and technolo- gies which may be embodied” (Broadhurst 2012: 168). The embodied experience of the
2 A servomotor, often abbreviated as servo, is a small device that allows for a precise automatic control of a mechanic system (Reed 2016). The servomotor is a popular and inexpensive method for motion and position control within robotics and wearable technology design.
‘Spider Dress 2.0’, one could even say, is somewhat similar to that of a spider in her web. The lines of the spider web, as Tim Ingold puts it in his playful philosophical dialogue be- tween an ant and a spider3, are an extension of the spider’s “very being as it trails into the environment” and comprise the lines along which the spider lives and conducts percep- tion and action in the world (Ingold 2008: 211). Like spiders know when a fly has landed in their web because they can feel the vibrations in the lines through their spindly legs (ibid.), wearers of the ‘Spider Dress 2.0’ know when a person is entering their personal space because they can perceive the intruder’s presence through the robotic spider legs. Thirdly, phenomenology calls attention to the lived experiences of ‘Spider Dress 2.0’, which helps to discover how the “symbiosis between body and machine (…) brings with it a new body consciousness” (Quinn 2002: 33). As Eco’s reflection on tight-fitting jeans elucidates, clothes can stimulate and heighten the wearer’s self-awareness: