Published November 6, 2015 | Version master
Project deliverable Open

Early Wearables Kit (Volume 1, Kits for Cultural History series)

Creators

  • 1. U. of Victoria
  • 2. U. of Victoria

Contributors

Contact person:

  • 1. U. of Victoria

Description

This repository contains files for the "Early Wearables Kit" made by the Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab) at the University of Victoria (http://maker.uvic.ca/). The Wearables Kit prompts people to reverse engineer and reassemble an electro-mobile skull stick-pin intended for cravats, designed by Gustave Trouvé, built by Auguste-Germain Cadet-Picard, and exhibited at the Exposition universelle in Paris in 1867. Powered by a 1.5-volt zinc-carbon battery located in the wearer's pocket, the skull on the pin was said to snap its jaws and move its eyes. To activate the battery, the wearer would flip the pocket battery from a vertical to a horizontal position. Once activated, the battery would trigger a mechanism (resembling that of an electric bell) hidden inside the skull, which was less than two centimeters in diameter. This combination of electricity with jewellery was not only unique for the 1860s; it also suggests the stick-pin was an early wearable technology.

To our knowledge, only one instance of this stick-pin exists in a memory institution today, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115814/stick-pin-cadet-picard-auguste/). However, it cannot be accessed, and it is not accompanied by the original battery.

After significant research, including archival work and rapid prototyping experiments, the MLab wonders if the skull was ever fully automated. So we submit both our suspicions and this repository for conjectural manufacture: a combination of critical distance from early wearable culture with immersion in the particulars of the pin's design.

The Early Wearables Kit includes 3-D models for the skull stick-pin, historical illustrations for contextualizing it, a guide for interpreting it, instructions for ways it may be assembled, and a box for storing, arranging, and circulating the Kit's components in tactile form. It also includes references for further reading, photographs of the Kit as it's been exhibited, metadata for the illustrations, and abstracts for academic essays published by the MLab about early wearables and rapid prototyping.

The Wearables Kit is Volume 1 in the MLab's Kits for Cultural History series. It was made with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF).

Files

earlyWearablesKit-v1.1.zip

Files (425.4 MB)

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Additional details

Related works

Is previous version of
https://github.com/uvicmakerlab/earlyWearablesKit/tree/master/ (URL)

References

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