#artcodes

What’s the deal with this moth costume?  The design rationale, explained

So if you click on the first image and zoom in you’ll see a designVUE rationale map for my moth costume at BTRDC. (I can’t get the interactive map to work on Tumblr so this one’s just a static image, sorry.)

The Silence of the Lambs: moths in costume

Artcodes

Sponsors

Patterns and fabrics

Fastening and fit

Lighting

Inks

We Want You?

The Silence of the Lambs: Moths in Costume

I got the idea for this when I found out that all the Death’s Head Moths in The Silence of the Lambs were actually normal moths, dressed in little costumes. Well if those moths get a costume, I get a costume. It’s only fair.

Artcodes

I also had been thinking about Artcodes and how they could be applied to wearables. Artcodes are machine-readable images, basically they’re pictures that work like QR codes, that you scan with a special app (App Store) (Google Play).  note

I see so many gorgeous Hannibal t-shirts and think, hmmm, wouldn’t that look great as an Artcode? But I’m not really a t-shirt wearer. When I got the idea for the death’s head moth costume, though, obviously the death’s head would have to go somewhere, so that’s where the Artcode comes in.

Sponsors

I explained all this to Mort and to my supervisor Jon Crowcroft and they saw the good sense of it. This project was realized thanks to the generosity and vivid imagination of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where I investigate wearables, IoT and privacy.

Patterns and fabrics

I used McCall’s pattern 5137C for the dress and if you look at the concept map, you can see how each printed fabric compares to the original poster moth. The poster moth is stylized, so I obviously spent quite a bit of time looking at images of real death’s head moths, but I ended up making much the same decisions either way. The moth on the poster also has a feature that I found inspiring.

Upper wings: The top part of the wings became the front bodice and top half of the sleeves (Pictures 1 and 2). I used a mottled orange-and-earthtone fabric for that. There was another fabric with more orange in it, that was a better match for the original, but it clashed with the fabric I was going to put next to it.

Lower wings: The bottom part of the wings became the front bodice band, sleeve bands, waistband and waist ties. That one is a photoprint of butterfly wings. (Pictures 1 and 2)

Thorax: The moth’s segmented thorax became the centre front and back panels (Picture 2). I used a black and orange tiger print for that. I considered making some black bias tape and sewing it down the centre front and back, but in the end I decided it looked better the way it was.

The black outline of the moth’s thorax became the side panels, the hem band and the back bodice (Pictures 1 and 2). I used a black and brown batik fabric for this.

Back bodice and death’s head: The back bodice is where the death’s head would go (Pictures 2 and 3). To make sure the fabric at the back didn’t move around too much and distort the picture, I stiffened it with medium-weight interfacing.

Fabric composition: All the fabrics are 100% cotton, all bought on eBay.

Fastening and fit

The dress pulls over the head and tightens by tying the back ties. I needed to give the dress enough ease to pull it on, but also make sure it didn’t crumple up when I tied it at the waist. So I used press studs (Pictures 3 and 4) at each side which snap together to tighten the dress, then you smooth the creases along their vertical length so they’re facing outward, and *then* you tie the waist ties at the back. The waist ties hide the press studs, and as long as the image is high enough above the waistband it doesn’t crumple when you tie the dress tight.

Lighting

Artcodes have done some work in layering the codes by colour [1] and I wondered if we could do the same thing with lighting conditions. Looking closely at the original movie poster, you can see that the skull on the moth is actually Halsman and Dalí’s In Voluptas Mors.

So our first task was to get an Artcode that would scan under a camera flash. And it does!!!

Inks

So this is the part we’re still working on: make the Artcode functionally not visible in normal light (like, you’d only see it if you knew it was there) but then have it come to life in a flash photo.

As you can see, we’re still working on making the image not-visible in normal light. It shows up more in a photo, but still, you can also see it pretty clearly in daylight (Picture 4).

But, you know, one thing at a time. We succeeded in getting an image that scans under flash (Picture 4), the next thing is to find the right inks to get that “now you see me/now you don’t” effect. 

The image in Picture 4 [2] is hand-painted [3] in Glowtec Starglow Ultra Reflective Paint, which gave us the well-defined edges we needed to make the image readable.

We also tried Albedo spray paint, which doesn’t work because it’s spray paint and you don’t get a clean edge. We tried some retroreflective ink powders for screen printing, but there was hardly any time left before BTRDC so that’s an experiment for another day.

So yeah, we have some experimenting to do, but I think it looks pretty cool already.

We Want You?

Hopefully! Like I said, we’re hoping to expand this into something larger, involving more people. So keep watching this space.

(Note: as of today, October 14 2016, if you download Artcodes it won’t have flash enabled, because the version with flash hasn’t been released yet. I was using a test version at BTRDC which does have flash, so it’s definitely coming soon. In the meantime, the app still works with images that don’t need flash.)

[1] Thorn, E., et al., 2016. Exploring large-scale interactive public illustrations. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2016). Brisbane, 4-8 June 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901826

[2] Death’s head by Liz Jeal

Tired Death's Head Moth is Tired

Welp, back from Behold the Red Dragon Con and I don't know about you, but I'm *bushed*.

The life of a moth is famously brief, but that's why it's so action packed. Yes, a reminder of the brevity of life always seems to be with me somehow, as if it were looking over my shoulder.

But we moths know how to have a good time. I have had a great weekend flying headfirst into any available light source, being starstruck at the beauty of the Hannibal cast and all my fellow Fannibals, and just fluttering around.

Keep your eyes peeled for a deadly new project from @hyperfashionist... #BeholdTheRedDragon @starfuryevents @artcodes_lab #interactivedesign pic.twitter.com/HTwS7PniWD