Mauro Arrighi, Anika Hirt and Onur Sönmez

DADAgear is composed of a pair of jackets that are equiped with handmade capacitive sensors that when under pressure trigger pre-recorded sounds and create a dadaist poem. It is a performative act, which investigates human-to-human interaction and social spaces via smart sweaters that generate poems through body language. Each of the three DADAgear garments is divided into sensible areas and touching those areas triggers the playback of random recorded words. The semantic potential of the performance is more fully explored when two or more players use multiple garments consecutively following a certain order. Then it is possible to formulate full sentences (even those might still have weird and/or unexpected meanings). Wireless communication between hoodies, which are equipped with capacitive sensors, and computers enables wearers to play with words and sounds while touching themselves and the other players: strangers must collaborate establishing an intimate connection in order to create the experimental poem.

What was your inspiration for this project?

'Actually we followed some of the Dadaist's precepts: rejecting logic, embracing chaos and irrationality… with a playful attitude. To be precise about this, I might mention Freeman who wrote: “Picabia himself ultimately abandoned machine-inspired imagery to create verbal-abstract pictures instead.” DADAgear follows a path which has been traced by Picabia’s invention of poems containing nonsensical sound, his 1920 Unique Eunuque, embraced the experimentation with illogical, yet suggestive language that was at the very heart of DADA". With DADAgear strangers must collaborate establishing an intimate connection in order to create the experimental poem.'