Peacocks and Wallflowers

This is an abstract for a forthcoming paper in a special issue of Sage's Visual Communication on wearable technology. This promises to be a very interesting issue with contributions also from CuteCircuit, Stephen Barrass and High Tea with Mrs Woo. The expected publication date is October 2008.

Peacocks and Wallflowers: (in)visibility with digital jewellery
As a genre of Ubiquitous Computing, wearables inherited a paradigmatic ideal of disappearance, and until very recently, visibility was treated as a simplistic dichotomous issue of overt versus covert technology. In line with calls by theorists in New Media for oscillation between states of invisibility and reflection in the design of interfaces, this paper presents findings from a networked jewellery project which reconceptualise this problem as both situated and dynamic, revealing that wearable artefacts segue between high states of visibility and disappearance just as they afford their wearers new ways to maintain social presence.

with thanks to Anne Cranny-Francis for inviting me to contribute!