Lori Weidenhammer
The idea for developing a series of brain dresses came out of a poem I wrote about a woman who wears her brain outside her skull, hovering above her as she walks home from a party. I decided to design a dress that would have the folds and undulations (gyri and sulci) of the brain. In my research for this project I discovered a case in medical history in which a fourteen year old girl had one vivid memory during a seizure. When the physician, (Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield), operated on her brain, he found that stimulating different areas of the brain brought back fragments of the memory, and prolonged stimulation caused the memory to flow in a narrative form. Reading about this case fed my desire to create a series of interfaces for memories and fantasies based on the model of the brain dress.
The first dress is an image of a Hydra, accumulating personalities as you stimulate her with your touch. The second dress reveals an acumulation and disintegration of memories from my childhood in rural Saskatchewan.
