The Fashion Robot

The conception of the body in the post-digital age commonly accepts the idea that the boy itself is no longer bound to its genetic set and a renaissance image. Man as measure of all things left way for the idea of specie within an ecosystem. The body aesthetic, no longer tied to a classicist notion, integrates more and more the concepts of prosthetics, mutation, and hybridization. We make daily use of prosthetics to fair or amplify capacities (computers, smartphones, vehicles). At the same time, the world of prosthetics and robotics has evolved to a point where the threshold between biology and mechanics has become heavily blurred: they are more and more similar to biological organs, in behavior and structure. The man-machine duality is overcome by the idea that every biological specie is a wet computer and, on the other hand, computers as we know them today are just primitive forms of a new biological specie. Aesthetics is the dimension in which the outcomes of morphogenetic systems generate patterns which interact with cultural systems, informing or affecting their evolution as well as being affected by them at once. Aesthetic experience happens when all the sense operate at their climax, it’s the moment of extreme sophistication in which a cultural production system is generated and then deploys itself acting on the same relationships that individuals establish with forms themselves (attraction or repulsion, two aspects of behavioral ecology). It is in this sense that fashion is intended: as a moment of fascination in which beauty (or repulsion) acquire the status of function. Cultural evolution has produced an imaginary of bodies and machines far beyond their purely functional dimension, especially in the pop universes of cinema and comics. The Otaku world in particular has been so far the most fertile ground on which robotics, aesthetics, cultural pulses and social models have interwoven and proliferated. Reiser and Umemoto, in “Atlas of Novel Tectonics”, defined architecture as a “mediator between matter and events”. Clothes, armors, prosthetics are mediators between body and space (physical and event space); they embody spatial articulation and differentiation among body parts and the functions they perform, affecting the deployment of capacities in the system in relation to the possible contingent situations facilitating, amplifying or inhibiting degrees of freedom and/or external exchange. Moreover they respond to environmental instances, protection and communication (patterns used as language or information transmission, such as transparencies used to modulate degrees of privacy and/or seduction for mating). In the dimension of ornament elements and figures that declare their identity and belonging are used as instrument for the harmonization and articulation of the system itself beyond mere function: ornament, made of more or less figurative patterns, builds up an added layer of aesthetic sophistication; in some cultures this function is exerted directly on the skin, through tattoos. Any of these variables is influencing the others in an intensive and turbulent field which evolves in space-time and where these influences engender emergent patterns & self-organization processes. As extensions of our collective metabolism, architecture tackle and organize the same instances on the scale of a community as emergent result of individual interaction: through spatial distribution pattern articulation they choreograph fluxes of matter-energy-information as a result of the forces interacting with the milieu upon which they are based: environmental pressure, culture, patterns of social interaction, resources, etc. The introduction of the theory of complexity has significant affects even on the aesthetic and culture dimension: the relations that forge meaning aren’t tied anymore to a formal repertoire made of a finite set of entities, rather forms themselves dynamically, evolving together with the effect of their own i...