The Toronto Wearables Meetup is a gathering of people interested in wearable technology, fashion, wearable electronics, soft circuits, electronic textiles, emerging materials, and other creative and innovative approaches to things that live on the body. This Meetup is intended for artists, fashion designers, industrial designers, textile enthusiasts, engineers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in these emerging and intersecting fields.  This event is open to the public.

Guest Speakers: Jessica Thompson, and the H2.0 Collective

Jessica Thompson is a media artist whose projects facilitate social situations in public space through sound, performance and wearable technologies.  Her studio practice involves the creation of interactive sound pieces that audience members are invited to borrow and use within urban environments, and large-scale collaborative performances.

Her work has been shown in numerous national and international exhibitions and festivals such as ISEA 2006 (San Jose, CA), FINE/LINE (Denmark), the Conflux Festival (New York), the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art, (Toronto) and most recently at the Norsk Teknisk Museum (Oslo).  Her projects have appeared in publications such as Canadian Art, c Magazine, Acoustic Territories, and numerous art and technology blogs. She holds a BFA in Visual Art from York University in Toronto and an MFA in Emerging Practices from SUNY at Buffalo.

Jessica Thompson:  http://www.jessicathompson.ca

The H2.0 Collective consists of OCAD art and design students Loretta Faveri, Joanne Jin, Michael Vaughn and Chris Holborn. The Collective launched their first exhibition at Nuit Blanche 2011, for which they designed a series of anthropomorphic dresses that interact with viewer’s movement, speech, and proximity.  Through this work the H2.0 Collective raises the issue of modern society’s reliance on technologies to represent one’s sentiments, while at the same time humouring and impressing the viewer with the capabilities of wearable soft circuits encased in their clever designs.

RSVP to the event: http://torontowearables8.eventbrite.com/

Additional information about the Toronto Wearables Meetup can be found here:

http://www.torontowearables.com/