SORCIÈRES
Witch capes for the digital age
During the week-long residence E-Textile Spring Break held in Wassaic, NY in April 2019, the participants were asked to come up with a project that could be related to the theme of Ritual. Together with fellow participant Alice Giordani I worked on a concept of Witches (Sorciéres) of the digital age, mixing feminist activism and technology in a playful duo project.
GOAL
The aim of Sorcières was to create garments that would offer a provocative medium for feminine/feminist self expression, a theme both Alice and I were very passionate from two different angles.
On one hand Alice, with her work as an activist in Paris and at hackerspace Datapaulette wanted to create a garment that could amplify the witch’s voice to a crowd, making her visible to society and heard by the world, therefore enabling the external world to pay attention, igniting social change.
On the other hand I was interested in working on the idea that the witch, in order to be heard and seen by the world, needs to focus on harnessing her inner power, the listening of her own heart, which would in turn give her the strength to act in and on the surrounding society.
Alice’s EXPRESSIVE process was inside-out, while mine was outside-in.
PROCESS
During the 6 days at the E-Textile Spring Break, we started brainstorming on our idea on day 2, while attending the various workshops and classes offered by the different artists. We chose to create witch capes because it was a bit of a provocation and also a fun garment to design and make in a couple days.
We created a few iterations of the pattern in muslin until we achieved the desired fit, then started sewing the capes in black fabric.
I initially wanted to incorporate a heartbeat sensor, but after realizing that the pulse sensor I bought was not able to provide relevant data I decided to focus on making a cape that would have a button activating a few LEDs and a vibration motor, allowing the “witch” to hear her own inner voice and restore her heart energy.
I worked with a Lilypad microcontroller, Neopixel LEDs from Adafruit and a vibration motor from Lilypad.
Because the heart is the witch’s inner power center, I decided to represent it with the heart chakra, called anahata in Sanskrit, which means “the unstruck, the unbeaten”.
The heart chakra’s representation is a circle containing a six point start, which coincidentally looks similar to the witch’s five point star.
I designed and vinyl cut a heart chakra in conductive fabric, which would be the button triggering the LEDs and the vibration motor. The circuit was hand sewn with conductive fabric, making sure I insulated the points in the circuit where the fabric crossed (to avoid short circuits).
OUTCOME
The outcome of our 3 day endeavor were two well-sewn interactive witch capes. Alice’s symbol was the logo of a French feminist collective she is part of, while mine was the heart chakra. We presented our work at the E-Textile Spring Break final exhibit in Wassaic and had a lot of fun explaining our concept to our fellow participants as well as the visitors.
What I mostly enjoyed about this experience was the empowerment I experienced in collaborating with Alice during our joint project.
With her superior skills in programming she taught me how to get better at making my own circuit and programming it, while I taught her how to make a pattern for a cape and sew it. We also got some helpful suggestions from other participants that allowed us to make two working prototypes in less than 4 days.
It was a great learning experience that I can’t wait to do again.
