Entangled Ecologies is a digital fashion show organized by Dartmouth Digital Arts & the DALI Lab exploring how bodies, technologies, and environments weave together into living systems of expression. We're interested in the messy, beautiful connections between people, technology, and the more-than-human world. In a moment defined by accelerating computation and ecological collapse, we ask:
We're exploring how clothing and art can move, sense, and respond. How might a dress might breathe with its wearer? How might a circuit mimic a root system? How might machines grow gardens of their own? Borrowing ideas from kinetic sculpture (think Iris van Herpen, Choe U-Ram) and Jessica Riskin's “Machines in the Garden,” our exhibition reconsiders the boundary between mechanism and life. Our theme of Entangled Ecologies invites anyone to build, upcycle, sew, and/or imagine something that lives between worlds: fashion and engineering, biology and computation, body and environment. Students from across all disciplines are invited to experiment, fabricate, and speculate.
Studio Art Professor Toloudi, one of the show's curators, describes the vision beautifully:
"We are exploring wearables not merely as objects of style, but as living, responsive extensions of human experience—adaptive architectures that learn from both their wearers and the environment. Clothing becomes an intermediate skin, a dynamic envelope between body and architectural shelter, attuning us to the ever-evolving socio-ecological context and suggesting new ways of inhabiting change."
Digital fashion shows have been held at Dartmouth in years past, as part of the Digital Arts Expo.
Another major source of inspiration is "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" a series of performances from 13–23 October 1966, where artists and engineers from Bell Laboratories collaborated on what was to be the first event in a series of projects that would become known as E.A.T. or Experiments in Art and Technology.
Their collaboration produced many "firsts" in the use of new technology for the theater, both with specially-designed systems and equipment and with innovative use of existing equipment. Closed-circuit television and television projection was used on stage for the first time; a fiber-optics camera picked up objects in a performer's pocket; an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness; a Doppler sonar device translated movement into sound; and portable wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers transmitted speech and body sounds to Armory loudspeakers.
Artists involved with 9 Evenings include: John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman.
Notable engineers involved include: Bela Julesz, Billy Klüver, Max Mathews, John Pierce, Manfred Schroeder, and Fred Waldhauer.
