Irene Posch
ABSTRACT
This paper describes Burglar Alarm, an installation based on two patents formulated in the 1890s. They propose a curtain as an alarm system, suggesting, among others, a metal thread as a circuit conductor woven throughout the fabric - an early formulation of smart textile potentials. The installation shows the patents, material samples of the circuit solutions they propose, and a recreation of the main functionality: a curtain producing an alarm when opened unexpectedly. The installation aims at a critical and historical perspective on smart textiles, providing viewers with a tangible provocation to current narratives of innovation. It presents and performs design considerations of interactive systems from more than a hundred years ago, contextualizing smart and electronic textiles as a historical technology. The work is part of an ongoing material inquiry into metal threads, and their historic and present use in aesthetic and technical objects.
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- Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak. 2016. CRAFTED LOGIC: Towards Hand-Crafting a Computer. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI EA '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3881--3884.Google ScholarDigital Library
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Index Terms
- Burglar Alarm: More Than 100 Years of Smart Textiles
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