Event 2: Anne Niemetz's Lecture

Annie Niemetz is a director and professor at Victoria University of Wellington. While she does spend time educating and sharing her insights with her students, she also devotes her time to be a media artist as well as a designer. Prior to attaining her position at Victoria University, she was a former student of Dr. Vesna when she was working on her MFA in the Department of Design | Media Arts at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). On May 3, 2016, she was generous enough to give a lecture regarding her career and projects thus far. Her primary focus, she said, is wearable technology, which is a field where art converges with science.

The first work she mentioned were pairs of suspenders influenced by Larry King. Although they may appear to be regular suspenders, they were developed to feature sound bites of King. The video in her lecture showed four people creating a composition. This was one of her many examples of the intersection between science and art. With the implementation of technology into the suspenders, science connects with art through not only fashion but also music.

Niemetz continued to provide numerous other examples of wearable technology. As seen in the picture on the right and other slides, light was a motif. In the picture, she displays the work of one of her students who integrated the use of light into designing a dress that also incorporates her culture (seen on the head). Other uses of light technology on fashion design included a wedding dress that lights up as well as rings with lights to assist ASL speakers in low-light conditions.

In addition to the intersection of art and science, intersection of math and art was apparent, specifically in the attire shown on the right. One can assume that math was essential in its creation as unlike parallelograms and inaccurate measurements would have produced a disproportionate design. As a result, the shape of identical parallelograms and the number of those parts to produce the whole needed extensive planning and calculations to precisely design the dress.

Wearable technology is a field that has interested me ever since smart watches began to be mass-produced. Therefore, Anne Niemetz's lecture, specifically regarding her and her students' works on wearable technology, was most definitely interesting to listen to and to view. In addition to recommending other people who are interested in the intersection of art and science to her lecture, I would encourage them to attend her exhibit on May 5, 2016.