Electric Skin, by Suzi Webster –a MFA student at the Slade Centre of Electronic Media, is a bio-responsive garment that turns the breath of the wearer into pulses of light, acting as a mediating membrane and seeking to create homeostasis between the wearer’s internal environment and the external environment. Video.

The garment is made of Elumin8 printed LEDs, silk and sensors.

The responsive garment turns the breath of the wearer into pulses of light. The wearer’s inhalation and exhalation activate a breath sensor that dims and brightens the printed LED of the garment. The wearer is engaged bathed in the electric aqua light. S/he is connected to the grid by an umbilical cord/power cable, and while this creates a seductive light, it also creates a frisson of danger and unease.
Other viewers see the intimate breathing of the wearer as slow pulses of light on the exterior of the garment.

Electric Skin is a hybrid object/performance that questions divisions between ‘subject/object’ ‘inner/outer’ and ‘mind/body’ and creates an experience of that liminal space that is neither inside nor outside, but is a third space inbetween.

Electric Skin will be presented this Friday at the How Smart Are We? symposium the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Related: Scuba, an audio device that allows you to adapt the soundscape from the external environment to your breath; the Kiss COmmunicator, the art of breathing, Breathe on me, the Breath Car.