About

Dadagear is a performative act, which investigates human-to-human interaction and social spaces via smart sweaters.

Members of the audience are invited to wear specially designed Dadagear sweaters that host integrated touch sensors. Touching the sweaters will start an auditive performance.

By touching oneself as well as hugging each other and punching, kicking or rolling on the floor, audience members can use the garments as instruments; fragments of sentences and sounds will become audible depending on where and how the sweaters have been touched.

Through this interaction a kind of Dadaistic generative poetry will emerge. The auditive outcome is digitally generated following the Dadaist’s precepts: randomness and a playful attitude.

While a single user could produce a non-complete sentence by its own, the semantic power of the performance is fully expressed when two ore more garments are ‘played’ consecutively following a certain order, it will be possible then to formulate full sentences, even those would still have weird and/or unexpected meaning. Sense of touch plays a key role in the performance, the way in which audience behaves is crucial: the more harder one puts his/her hand/s on the sensible area/s the more intense becomes the “tone” of the spoken words switching, for example, from the words “whispering” through “talking” culminating with “shouting”, if a strong pressure would be applied.

The project aims is also to implement Dadaistic elements into pop culture. Recently haute couture turns even sweaters, this symbol of the underground culture, into another expensive object of desire. As authors we turn this object into a creative haptic interface.

Project by:
Mauro Arrighi – www.dreamingwww.com
Anika Hirt – www.deadbeat.cc
Onur Sönmez – www.bigblackmonkey.com
Developed at: Interface Cultures, Institute for Media, University of Art and Industrial Design, Linz.