Fashion, Technology Collide in New Funk Center Exhibit
‘Coded Couture’ Offers Garments,
Video, Drawings and More
MELBOURNE, FLA. — The Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at Florida Institute of Technology is pleased to announce its latest exhibit, Coded Couture. The interactive exhibition, which explores the idea of customized fashion in the digital age, is on view at the Funk Center through April 28.
Organized by Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Coded Couture presents garments, video, objects, drawings, photographs and interactive elements by 10 national and international designers. Simply stated, to code is to convert a piece of information into another form. The featured designers each use coding to convert a consumer’s personal information into a custom garment, tapping into one of four approaches to coding: biological, cultural, psychological or synergistic.
Work integrating technologies such as speech recognition sensors and heartbeat monitors and created with methods ranging from 3D printing to hand-embroidery will be on display. Visitors will also have the opportunity to interact and participate in the design process.
“It seemed like a natural fit that these designers were looking at ways to change things and alter them in real time, based on – in some cases – your social media profiles, your psychological questionnaires, what you say and what you reveal about yourself, as opposed to just your physical measurements,” Coded Couture co-curator Ginger Gregg Duggan told U.S. News and World Report.
Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, working as the curatorial partnership c², curated the traveling exhibition. It is organized by the Department of Exhibitions, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and sponsored in part by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.
Among the artists featured is British designer Amy Congdon. Her “Biological Atelier: SS 2082 ‘Extinct’ Collection” considers the changing and blurring roles of the designer, the craftsman and the scientist in the biotechnological future – through the imagined fashion atelier, or workshop, of 2080. It is a world, according to Congdon’s website, “where materials are not made they are grown, where new luxury materials are fashioned from cells not fabrics.”
In her collections, according to Duggan and Fox, Congdon employs traditional textile techniques like embroidery, but the new tools and materials at her disposal—tissue engineering and bio-ink-jet printing—allow her to completely transform the result.
Congdon will be at Florida Tech on March 27 as part of the Funk Center’s Friends of Textile Lecture Series.
Admission to the center is free. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. The center is next to Evans Library on the Florida Tech campus, 150 W. University Blvd. in Melbourne. For more information, visit http://textiles.fit.edu or call 321-674-8313.
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