PROXIMA

Proxima is a love story. Created for the second annual Make Fashion exhibition and working with engineers at the SAIT RADLab, we collaborated to create a physical manifestation of the ‘electricity’ produced between two lovers as they move closer to one another.

The seed of the idea for this year’s piece grew out of a desire to explore the concept of closeness, and how a garment might react to the presence of another person. Programmed to light up based on the proximity of RFID tags hidden within the male dancer’s costume, during the show the jacket lit up only in his presence. The closer he came to the female dancer, the more the lights sparkled. The jacket responds not only to proximity, but also directionality, so when the dancers faced each other, the front of Megan’s jacket lit up, and as she moved around Ben, the light would follow whichever part of her body was closest to his.

Proxima has been featured on Hackaday.com, RFID Journal, Make: Magazine and the Adafruit Blog.

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Technical Explanation by Ben Reed, Engineer and Researcher at the SAIT RADLab:



Collaborators:
Hannah Newton (Design), Ben Reed, Dan Damron and Chris Zaal (RFID Technology - SAIT RADLab)
Footage by Paul Spenard; photos by Andras Schram and Kelly Hofer.