This is the post-print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & FrancisWearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment. Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab whic...

Chor eographic principles of composition are largely directed at the creation of movement and the temporal organization of moving bodies in space. Some choreographers (e.g. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) think of this process as "temporary drawings" [1]; others (e.g. William Forsythe) work with complexity theories in mind and develop spatial methodologies for bodily extensions into environments that negotiate the intervals between presence (states of being) and transmutable movement in multiple ways. In tanztheater, the dancers' presence resonates with darker undertones-emotional turmoils acted out through obsessively repeated gestures and acute physical/psychic self-revelation (see the work of Pina Bausch) [2]. In comparison, Japanese butoh dance contains its metaphysics in movement that slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, lives and breathes an interior world, the body metamorphosing between spirit, flesh and matter, animal and human forms, ineffable shapes.Choreography always writes the presence of bodies in the theater in particular ways, but in contemporary digital or mixed-reality performance, such writing is now considered to be taking place in processual biogrammatic events or assemblages articulated through performative interfaces or "transductions," as Sher Doruff calls them [3]. The performing bodies perform with or through media, with accessories and within compositional matrices-programmed environments-that can affect multiple sensory perceptions. What we propose in this essay are questions that primarily concern sound wearability and transformability of sound and sounding bodies in choreography, shifting attention to the design processes of creating particularized audiophonic, amplificatory and kinaesonic costumes to be worn by dancers, actors and musicians. Design processes take over core dramaturgical propositions, but as movement and sound propositions they also constitute new aesthetic challenges for perceptual experiences in interactive and immersive installations.We ask, firstly, how the functions and aesthetics of body-worn technologies enhance the bodies' engagement with the environment as transmitters, receivers and enablers of sensory information; and, secondly, how one can develop new design processes in the context of different cultural dance vocabularies through 20th-and 21st-century technology and its impact on aural perception-and thus how wearability can enhance listeners' performance of the audible or performativity of sound. The WearabiliTy of Sound: audible inTimacieSIntimate wearables (garments or accessories) challenge performers and audiences alike when the focus of a work's aesthetic design is directed at creating particular sound characters that subtly redefine the idea of the "instrument" as well as dance's temporal drawings-especially the latter's gestural, narrative and erotic characteristics. The "instrument" here is both an object (a musical device created for the purpose of making musical sounds) and a body. The performers engage their instrument and invite the audience to observe, ...

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