A familiar bodily material becomes an expressive, mechanically animated textile surface.
Interactive wearable artwork · 2012
Untangle Me
A violet-haired dress that trembles when its brush is lifted, turning an ordinary act of grooming into a playful negotiation between visitor, garment and tool.
Read the project ↓
Project typeArtwork · Installation / environment · Collaboration · Fashiontech
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Wearables & e-textiles
FormInteractive wearable artwork
Developed2012
InteractionHairbrush removal / movement
ExhibitedTECHNOSENSUAL · MuseumsQuartier Vienna
01 · Proposition
A garment asks to be cared for
Untangle Me behaves less like passive clothing than a restless character: removing its supplied hairbrush activates the dress and sets its dense violet surface in motion.
Created by Django Steenbakker and Ricardo O’Nascimento, the work combines the silhouette of a party dress with long artificial hair and an ornamental hand mirror that doubles as a brush. In exhibition, the tool rests apart from the garment. Lifting it begins the encounter: the dress shakes while the visitor is invited to brush its moving surface.
The simple trigger transforms grooming into a public and reciprocal action. The visitor appears to care for and control the garment, yet the garment’s agitation also directs the visitor’s behaviour. Fashion becomes an animated interface through which care, vanity, discipline and bodily agency can be played out rather than merely represented.
Video documentation
See the interaction in motion
02 · Experience
Lift, activate, brush
- 01
Encounter
A still, hair-covered dress and a separate ornamental brush present an immediately legible grooming scene.
- 02
Activate
Removing the brush from its support triggers the garment, causing the violet surface to shake and move.
- 03
Respond
The visitor can brush the agitated material, completing a tactile exchange between person, tool and wearable object.
03 · Reflection
The wearable becomes a character
A small behavioural rule gives the garment temperament: it demands attention rather than simply waiting to be worn or observed.
Untangle Me does not use interactivity to improve the dress’s practical function. Instead, movement gives the textile surface an ambiguous form of agency. The hair suggests both a material that requires maintenance and a bodily feature associated with identity, display and social discipline. Because the brush also contains a mirror, the encounter folds self-image into the act of caring for another body-like object. Control remains deliberately unsettled: the visitor activates the dress, but its visible agitation prompts what happens next.
One object connects touch, maintenance, ornament and self-observation.
The visitor acts on the dress while the dress’s behaviour guides the visitor in return.
Credits & archive
Project record
- Design
- DJANGO / Django Steenbakker
- Interaction
- Ricardo O’Nascimento
- Model
- Annette / Mother Agency
- Video
- Local Androids
- Exhibition
- TECHNOSENSUAL, quartier21 / MuseumsQuartier Vienna, 15 June–2 September 2012
- Exhibition curator
- Anouk Wipprecht
- Exhibition photography
- Viki Secrets
