Technology is increasingly infiltrating all aspects of our lives and the rapid uptake of devices that live near, on or in our bodies is facilitating radical new ways of working, relating and socialising. This distribution of technology into the very fabric of our everyday life creates new possibilities, but also raises questions regarding our future relationship with data and the quantified self. By embedding technology into the fabric of our clothes and accessories, it becomes ‘wearable’. Such ‘wearables’ enable the acquisition of and the connection to vast amounts of data about people and environments in order to provide life-augmenting levels of interactivity.

The works exhibited in Wear Next_ provide a snapshot into the broad spectrum of wearables in design and in development internationally. Featuring works from 48 artists from Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and United States of America, this exhibition serves as a platform for enhanced broader debate around future technology, our mediated future-selves and the evolution of human interactions.

As you explore the exhibition, may we ask that you pause and think to yourself, what might we…. Wear Next?

Tobias Klein’s work Embodiment was exhibited in the WearnNext 2016.

Embodiment is a series of 2 large scale prints exploring through the use of non-invasive visualization techniques, the body within the emergent immersive environment of a virtual continuum. Raw data of a human MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan is taken as a starting point for a series of territorial investigations, iconising the soft boundaries of voxel data driven constructs . Here, digital processes are used to create three-dimensional images from the inside of the body, as a result of interactive static and variable gradients of magnetic fields. In addition, data is generated and assembled with the use of the 2DFT (Two-Dimensional Fourier Transform) technique that incorporates slice selection, in which a magnetic gradient is applied during the radio frequency pulse.

The body’s densities are imaged, digitized, manipulated, projected and re-imagined, creating a tentative four-dimensional representation: a simulacrum.

The exhibition opened from March 5th, 2016 to March 25th, 2016.