Neither interactive nor reactive.
Instant film pictures taken with the Polaroid sheet camera and put inside felt photo corners sewn on a t-shirt.
Thanks to N. Hayakawa for the photo session assistance.
We’ve put together a wearable randomness generator and display that, by way of a simple gestural interface, shows hexagrams from the Book of Changes (I Ching).
The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into the dystopic universe of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.
In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.
Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.
In a way, from an absurdist point of view, characters in the book are embracing and surrendering to randomness, almost as if they were saying “Since the ultimate purpose of the universe and my own life is beyond my comprehension, I don’t see how hard, rational cold analysis is in any way a better tool for living than random pieces of wisdom fortuitously thrown at me by the cosmos.” Some of these fictional people would probably be willing to wear a Hexagram shirt.
The shirt itself is a very simple device that allows the 1960s dystopian inhabitant to obtain a hexagram that can be looked up in the Book of Changes. It also works as an active agent of randomness by publicly displaying the hexagram, thus giving onlookers an unsolicited random answer to a question that possibly hasn’t been asked yet. (Which might make some sort of sense in Philip K. Dick’s universe.)
To cast a hexagram, the wearer shakes the sleeves of the shirt (as if he was shaking coins in the traditional I Ching way), this gesture generates a series of clicking noises and random luminescent patterns that ritualistically make way for the final configuration of the hexagram (as shown in the videos.)
Most components* that make up the Hexagram shirt are really old school. Arguably someone could have gathered all the materials and built the shirt in the 1960s, it just uses some clicking-sounding relays, noisy inverters, aluminum foil and electroluminescent sheets. That wasn’t really planned for, it all sort of fell into place, you see.
(*) Okay, the whole thing is driven by a contemporary, not-from-a-parallel-universe Wiring board. So much for the parahistorical accidental accuracy!
Photograph model: Orlando Moreno
Dearest Zazazizung friends: May randomness bring good things for you in 2008. Hold on, since we are invoking randomness here, it’s very unlikely that it will bring good things to all of you, being it so random, you see. On the other hand, since we don’t have that many visitors, let alone friends, then it wouldn’t make the goddess of probabilities go crazy and commit suicide if all of you, imaginary or carbon-based, would have a great 2008.
Anyways, thanks for reading us during 2007. This year sucked, by the way, but next one’s gonna be awesome! Right?
(footage of some EL oracle telling in the form of hexagrams what 2008 will bring!)
Scenario: Subject A and subject B are wearing t-shirts, the Goodbye t-shirt combo, to be precise. For some reason outside the scope of this weblog, subject A has to leave, leave for good, you know.
Okay, subject A and subject B are acquaintances of some kind, so, as humans often do, they decide to give each other a sappy, dramatic goodbye hug. Subject A gets on the steam train, or some other romantic-sounding means of transportation, leaving subject B lonely and real sad.
All of a sudden, subject B notices that the glowing image on subject A’s t-shirt appears to be glowing on his boring t-shirt now! (they both have been drinking, it’s late at night and it’s dark, mind you.) What could this possibly mean? Can it be a good omen? subject B wonders, while the copied image on his chest slowly fades until it becomes just a memory. Somehow, subject B’s sadness increases tenfold.
Well, it’s obvious that right from the start subject B knew what the Goodbye t-shirt combo does, so he can’t possibly be surprised, can he? Apparently, the t-shirts act as sadness amplifiers of some kind. Maybe subject B is into that sort of thing, we don’t know.
What about subject A? She is staring at her stupid battery-powered glowing t-shirt as the steam boat she’s in cruises along the river. Alas! the t-shirt doesn’t look one bit as fun as it did when she wore it for the first time. Freakin’ sadness amplifiers! they really work!
Thanks a lot Catalina y Mario (subjects A and B)
From the Zazaziza dusty archives we have managed to unearth an old Kazumba t-shirts video; it shows a mysterious hand holding different ultraviolet and white light-emitting devices that wildly excite paths of photoluminescent molecules along their way!!! Okay, no amount of exclamation signs will make this one look exciting, but here it is anyway for documentation purposes.