Garment 3

[ The Crawl ]

For this garment I was experimenting with inflating pockets of silicone. My first tests used large, flat pockets of silicone. These worked well for an initial inflation but they never held the air or inflated very much.

I made these smaller pockets with silicone that was left in the cups I used to mix the silicone. These worked much better and I really liked the effect the inflation, and the sensation if you held it against your skin. I thought that it looked like it could burst at any second and imagined that a lot of these all over the body would look really gross.

I could never get the inflation to seal very well and no matter what I did it would eventually burst. I also reassessed what I was achieving with this design and decided to move away from inflating the body.

When experimenting for the monster, I made these small tubes out of pens. When I changed to the Ecoflex 30, the tubes inflated really well and looked like worms. This reminded me of something one of the interviewees and said; that being watched by men makes her 'skin crawl'. I decided to experiment more with making these little worms for this garment.

I added a second worm and played with the code to try and get them to move more like worms. I envisioned them underneath fabric, so I designed the movement around how I felt this would make the fabric move the most. I was able to get quite a nice sequence that looked like they were dancing.

In the Testbed event I showed the worms underneath fabric. This worked quite well, though it was hard to get them to stay in place as I didn't want to permanently stick them to anything. They got an interesting reaction with some people being grossed out by it and others wanting to lift the cloth and look underneath.

I made 5 moulds for to experiment with movement. I had a lot of issues with them as they were so small. Most of the outcomes could never be inflated due to holes or casting issues. This one, the last iteration, did inflate, but I couldn't reliably cast more than one, so decided it was too unpredictable to cast lots of them.

When I started designing my PCB, I realised I was going to need an obscene amount of pumps and valves. I experimented with ways to reduce this. If I just added a splitter to the valve then the inflation didn't work very well at all, but if I added the valves after the splitter I could still get a good inflation. I would have to have only half the worms inflate at once, but I thought this would be enough.

I wanted to try and make the worms more visible under the fabric. My initial thought was liquid, but this wasn't possible due to time and financial restrictions. I tested different dye options and decided on a glow in the dark effect. I cast the worms for the final garment, but I started to worry that they were a bit crepey and would burst easily. They still inflated well and they made a nice sound, but I also cast normal red ones just in case.

I started constructing the garment and put in a few worms to test how it was working. It worked really well and I was happy with how the movement design was looking at this stage.

I added more worms and noticed that some pumps weren't operating at full power, so weren't inflating the worms. I took everything apart and made sure every exposed wire was covered. I still had the issues so I added a second power cable. This fixed the issue and all of the worms inflated. I also tweaked the code slightly to be more varied on the body.

I added the dress over the top with a front panel to cover the bust. This worked really well when I turned on the worms. I was really happy with how the fabric moved and it looked like something was moving underneath trying to burst out.