“In Touch with the Here, the Now, the Body and the World: Technologically Mediated Being-in-the-world from a 4EA-cognition Perspective” – Danny Steur

In the case of Lianne Toussaint and Pauline van Dongen, the meeting of an academic and fashion designer led to an ongoing collaboration whose output consists of both creative products and research – two practices that strongly inform and become deeply entangled with one another. In “In Touch with the Now: Stimulating Mindfulness through a Smart Denim Jacket,” the duo describes and reflects on the process of developing the Issho smart jacket, a techno-fashion garment laced with touch-sensitive conductive yarn that can give haptic feedback to the wearer, for example emulating a caress on the back (van Dongen and Toussaint 2019). Instead of the usual utilitarian techno-babble around wearable technologies aimed predominantly at biological measurements, the techno-fashion paradigm they develop is oriented more towards how such garments materially mediate relations between the human body and the world, and how these garments inspire theoretical reflection on the relations between bodies, technologies, fashion and lived experience. Thereto, they employ a postphenomenological approach, to assess the ways in which technology materially mediates wearers’ experience of the world. As the title of their paper indicates, with Issho they aim to stimulate mindfulness, a notion they disconnect “from its manifold therapeutic, spiritual, or meditative associations in order to narrow it down to a more mundane and down-to-earth state of embodied awareness” (van Dongen and Toussaint 2019, original emphasis).

Figure 1: Issho’s denim, laced with conductive yarn. Image credits: taken from “In Touch with the Now” (van Dongen and Toussaint 2019).

Here, the authors appeal to our embodied experiencing of the world, though perhaps this perspective could be fleshed out further by invoking other aspects of the interdisciplinary research field of 4EA (alternatively, frequently denoted as 4E), which contends that cognition is not solely located in the brain, or mind, but unfolds in continuous interactions between brain, body and environment, and is Embodied, Enactive, Embedded, Extended and Affective (Paine 2016, 89). These additional qualities may shed new light on how techno-fashion influences our worldly being and doing. They illuminate, for instance, how we cognitively extend our embodied selves into the world through technologies. Of course, such assertions remain similar to what van Dongen and Toussaint already claim, but the framework of 4EA might allow for evocative re-articulations and re-interpretations of their findings. For instance, integrating a focus on the extended element of cognition: the mindfulness Issho encourages then becomes, besides a disruption of common actions undertaken on autopilot (van Dongen and Toussaint 2019), a re-orientation of how we are present in the world and are able to extend into this world through technologies, and how it enables us to do and be differently in the world. From the perspective of extended cognition, we are tempted to ask the question of how it might be possible to incorporate a purposeful use of the garment, a way of using these technologies so that it allows us to do things we could not before? This risks, perhaps, a return to utilitarian techno-babble, but incorporating an explicit 4EA perspective seems able to offer new perspectives, questions and explanations for the inspiring work undertaken with these techno-fashion garments.

References:

• van Dongen, Pauline, and Lianne Toussaint. 2019. “In Touch with the Now: Stimulating Mindfulness through a Smart Denim Jacket.” APRIA: ArtEZ Platform for Research Interventions of the Arts 1, no. 1. https://apria.artez.nl/in-touch-with-the-now/.
• Paine, Rachel. 2016. “4EA.” The Philosophers’ Magazine 72, no. 1: 89-90. https://doi.org/10.5840/tpm20167246.