Soft body prostheses return touch as a local tactile response on the wearer’s skin.
Experimental wearable performance · 2014
Just Dance!
Wearable body extensions translate pressure, vibration and sound into a live encounter between performer, artefact and audience.
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Project typeArtwork · Installation / environment · Performance · Fashiontech
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Wearables & e-textiles · Speculative & critical design
FormExperimental wearable performance
Developed2014
ContextE-textile, dance and sound pressure cooker
PresentedSTEIM · Amsterdam
01 · Proposition
The body becomes an unstable instrument
Just Dance! explores how wearable extensions can alter bodily sensation, movement and sound rather than simply decorating a performer.
Developed during a three-day collaborative pressure cooker at STEIM, the work grew from experiments with wearable technology, body enhancement and performance. Soft, bulbous prostheses responded to pressure and returned vibration to the skin, creating a loop between touch, sensation and action.
A second experiment placed a small speaker in front of the mouth so that its shape could act as a resonator. Together, these propositions shifted sound away from a remote stage system and into intimate contact with the body. The resulting encounter was presented within a continuous public performance assembled by the participants at STEIM.
02 · Experience
Attach, sense, respond
- 01
Extend
Wearable prostheses add unfamiliar volumes and interfaces to the performer’s body.
- 02
Translate
Pressure becomes vibration, while a mouth-mounted speaker uses the performer’s own body as a resonating chamber.
- 03
Negotiate
Performer and audience encounter the extensions through touch, sound, movement and changing bodily attention.
03 · Reflection
An enhancement can also be a complication
The project treats wearable technology as something that unsettles the body rather than quietly optimising it.
The STEIM experiments were framed through the idea of body enhancements that have gone wrong: extensions that do not conform, remain awkward or demand new techniques of use. Just Dance! keeps this productive instability visible. Feedback is felt on the skin, sound is reshaped by the mouth and the wearable becomes a partner whose behaviour must be learned. The work asks how technology might change bodily agency when it is impossible to ignore.
A small wearable speaker makes the changing shape of the mouth part of the sound system.
The extensions move between demonstration and participation within a shared performance space.
Exhibition history
Selected presentations
Interactions between e-textile, dance and sound
STEIM
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Credits & archive
Project record
- Wearable pressure and vibration prostheses
- Ricardo O’Nascimento and Marije Baalman
- Mouth-resonator experiment
- Nicolo Merendini, Ricardo O’Nascimento and Marije Baalman
- Collaborative programme
- STEIM e-textile, dance and sound pressure-cooker participants
