1.2

Shirt Operations

Taking the systems and relationships discovered through your careful analysis of the shirt you will now deconstruct and or experiment with the surface of the shirt. While mapping the surface of the shirt as object you found a process for measuring. It is now your task to defamiliarize yourself from that shirt and operate on and or manipulate its surface. The shirt is no longer the object that you once knew. You may physically operate on the shirt, map the movement of its surface through differing actions such as taking off putting on, folding ect., and or deconstruct the shirt using inherent systems found in the shirt and then reconstruct it as something new. When you observe, dissect, and or map the shirt from now on you should look past its objectivity and identify it as surface with structure. You may ask yourself how does the structure affect the surface? What are the systems that give this shirt structure? Reference how a tailor works or research the history on http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/shocker/FemInv/. Look at the shirt as skin (surface) versus bones (structure). Your operations and or manipulations will not be ambiguous. They will be either surgical or topological.

From the shirt manipulations you will derive rules necessary for your specific operation. The rules will be derived from the operations you extract and will become a pattern code for the surface of the shirt. The next two weeks of the semester will be spent researching the themes and the systems found in the shirt and your manipulations of that surface. Your physical operations will produce a conceptual theme and will be translated through disparate surfaces during the course of the semester. With this investigation will come new design processes, fabrication methods, and aesthetic directions.

There are examples in the first presentation.

Have fun.