It’s New York Fashion Week, and there is a frenzy backstage as models are worked into their dresses and mob the assembled engineers for instructions of how to operate the technology that magically transforms a subtle gesture into a glowing garment suggestive of the bioluminescence of jellyfish. I know there’s not enough time for them to do their work. Almost instinctively, I find the designer and bargain for 20 more minutes.

While I wonder to myself how I got here, backstage at a runway show, I also know I am witnessing what may be the harbinger of how a fourth industrial revolution is set to change fashion, resulting in a new materiality of computation that will transform a certain slice of fashion designers into the “developers” of a whole new category of clothing. By driving new partnerships in tools, materials and technologies, this revolution has the potential to dramatically reshape how we produce fashion at a scale not seen since the invention of the jacquard loom.

The jacquard loom, as it happens, inspired the earliest computers. Ever since, textile development and technology have been on an interwoven path — sometimes more loosely knit, but becoming increasingly tighter in the last five years. Around that time, my colleagues and I embarked on a project in our labs to look at “fashion tech,” which at the time was a fringe term. These were pioneers daring to — sometimes literally — weave together technology and clothing to drive new ways of thinking about the “shape” of computation. But as we looked around the fashion industry, it became clear that designers lacked the tools to harness the potential of new technologies.

For a start, all facets of technology needed to be more malleable. Batteries, processors and sensors, in particular, had to evolve from being bulky and rigid to being softer, flexible and stretchable. Thus, I began to champion “Puck [rigid], Patch [flexible], Apparel [integrated],” an internal mantra to describe what I felt would be the material transformations of sensing and computation.

As our technologies have steadily become smaller, faster and more energy efficient — a progression known in the tech industry as Moore’s Law — we’ve gone on to launch a computer the size of a postage stamp and worked with a fashion tech designer to demonstrate its capabilities. In this case we were able to show dresses that were generated not just from sketches and traditional materials, but forward-looking tools (body scans and Computer Assisted Design renderings) and materials (in this case, 3-D printed nylon). At the same time, we integrated a variety of sensors (proximity, brain-wave activity, heart-rate, etc.) that allowed the garments themselves to sense and communicate in ways that showed how fashion — inspired in part by biology — might become the interface between people and the world around them.

Eventually, a meeting between Intel and the CFDA lent support to the idea that if technology could fit more seamlessly into designs, then it would be more valuable to fashion designers. The realisation helped birth the Intel Curie module, which has since made its way down the catwalk, embedded into a slew of designs that could help wearers adapt, interpret and respond to the world around them, for example, by “sensing” adrenaline or allowing subtle gestures to illuminate a garment.

As the relationship between fashion and technology continues to evolve, we will need to reimagine research and development, supply chains, business models and more. But perhaps more than anything, as fashion and technology merge, we must embrace a new strand of collaborative transdisciplinary design expertise and integrate software, sensors, processors and synthetic and biological materials into a designer’s tool kit.

Technology will inform the warp and weft of the fabric of fashion’s future. This will trigger discussions not just about fashion as an increasingly literal interface between people, our biology and the world around us, but also about the implications that data will generate for access, health, privacy and self-expression as we look ahead. We are indeed on the precipice of a fourth industrial revolution.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/red-carpet-celebrity-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/black-formal-dresses

.              Part One               .

January
I wake up in a hungover haze that seems
Irrevocably unending. All the places I threw up,
That stiffness in my neck, the emptiness in my love;
There is too much to feel
So I feel numbness
And I feel remnants
Of ***** in my throat, only manifested fully
When my friends and I make fortune cookies,
Singing along to songs that we’re hearing for the first time
Amidst the chaos of exploding poinsettia plants and nascent tattoos,
All of which litter your mom’s otherwise bare counter.
I don’t make much mention, in my fortune cookies,
Of that girl who still leaves me hungover;
I fill them instead with cruel jokes
That send me cackling
Until my dehydrated headaches pass into

February
When I’m moonlit tipsy stumbling
Through a campus-wide coniferous forest in Washington State
With two strangers that I soberly think
Might be my future.
We arrive at the clear polluted waters
Of the Puget Sound, our boots all
Sinking into deep-mud as we walk past broken bits of shells
To low tide.
Even as the full moon sinks and I realize
That those two strangers can never be my future
(That Athens, Ohio is my future)
I still walk forward
Into the Puget Sound
Knowing that the water will stay with me
In my lungs, on my skin,
In my mind, and although I don’t tell a single person, I fear,
So rightly,
That the water from the Puget Sound,
Set to perpetually accumulate in my lungs,
Will one day come to drown me.
Even as I cry to my mom in our kitchen,
Relieved from that seemingly endless indecision
I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised
By the choice I’ve made, I’m not surprised
By the fears I still have, all that surprises me
About any of this
Is the immediacy with which
My conclusion’s future culmination begins, as I begin
And continue
While always feeling like I’m concluding,
An infinite

March
In spirals, spirals, spirals, leaving trails
In subconscious sands, someone paints
Blue spirals on my body, and when
I drive back to Lake Erie later,
To retrieve abandoned items and moments,
The road looks much different.
Less swirly, less threatening at first, and when we get there
We eat pineapple/onion pizza on my ****** cottage’s front porch,
Just barely shielded from the snow, and just barely
Shielded from one another. And even those
Slim shields between us begin to fall
When we stand on our melting Lake Erie.
Because the whole world
Calls to us.
The sky screams, the wind explodes,
The thin layer of water above ice rushes
Blissfully, almost hallucinogenically, towards you and towards I
And I am howling
Into the face of it all,
Fearing nothing—not even
The absence of that girl’s palm in mine
Or the water from the Puget Sound
Or the cold of the air
That is tearing at my scalp; that is tearing
At my whole being and

April
Is best described by a rampage
Home from a campsite
That I only ever saw
Drunkenly, in the dark, and under the pressure
Of Allan Ginsberg’s poetry and an ultimately failed ****.
On that rampage we steal tombstones,
We steal memories for ourselves,
And we steal crass glances
With crass jokes that sound sort of
Like the crass fortune cookies which somehow
Never went bad.
Someone notes during that drive
That the air is getting warmer
With regularity now,
And while I somehow can’t bring myself to cry when my cousin is shot to death,
I have to struggle to hold back tears
In our high school’s only classroom when you tell me
That you’re quitting that play we signed up for together.
I guess it’s cuz I’m concerned—
Cuz I’m deeply
Deeply
Deeply concerned—
That it’s a lack of dedication
To me, to what we do together, to everything
That will prevent my rampage from concluding quietly
Amidst the smells of Indian food and the soft light
In your future dorm room
Where I will hug you
And where I

May
Finally
Let all the tears
Flow freely.
I guess it’s the unnecessary intensity
Of this collective celebratory anticipation
That preemptively reveals to me
That the moment of walking across a stage
To receive my high-school diploma
Won’t be quite as transformative as I’d hoped it might be,
And when I make out with that girl who still has me hungover
In the bed at my dad’s house where I lost my virginity
Almost exactly one year prior, I realize that in fact,
I’m still marching the same march, and
Both magic moments of idealized transformation in that bed
Were just as illusory.
Somehow though
Your no longer nascent tattoos have not yet faded
And I can’t help but worry,
(As sweat pours from my forehead and drenches these bedsheets;
As my finger nestles itself tiredly between the folds of her ******)
That I have, and in

June
When all my anticipation is realized,
People clap in the audience despite the fact
That it’s the same stream of sweat
That’s trickling down along my spine
To reach my ***.
I stare into the spotlight
For just a moment, amidst those stale applause
And in my squint, I think briefly
That none of it ******* mattered. I mean,
Despite this perspiration, I’m
Dehydrated. Hungover. I guess
Drinking more alcohol
Isn’t the best way to get over it, but I can think of nothing else,
So even when I acknowledge
That all my attempts have not even been half-assed,
But, like, one-quarter-assed
The only resolve I find is in distraction, in
******* my other ex-girlfriend instead
And not until that distant

July
When I’m ascending through Never Sink,
Does my head finally
Feel clear, yes,
In that glowing blue pit
Of bioluminescence,
I feel the whole world slow to a stop,
Embrace my body with its taproots
And whisper
Playfully and
In a child’s voice,
“You are the whole world” and I know that I
Am the whole world.
I breathe heavily, the only sound for miles around,
And for a moment I feel that the Puget Sound,
Along with everything else that is so ******,
Has fallen away.
For it is not my body
That is climbing on-rope through the stars and galaxies of this great sinkhole
But my mind,
But my soul,
Because Never Sink
Is not a landscape
But a mind-scape,
A soul-scape,
And it is one which is never dark
Thanks to the blue lights of soulful- (not bio-) luminescence—
A glow that is strong enough to see
Finally
A singularity
In the form of an unlocked lock,
Appearing with grace upon my driveway
After I return home
From ******* my other ex-girlfriend
For the last time.
It is only when I stop the car,
Open the door,
And hold that unlocked lock in my hand that I realize the extent to which
I am being
Un-defined.
The ethereal being in Never Sink’s soul-scape,
Alone in the blue grace of the night,
With nothing in my breath.
The thought is terrifying.
So in

August
On the night of my eighteenth birthday,
The girl I’m hung over and I
Send magical, sparkling lanterns into the sky
With a wish so brilliantly bright and simultaneous
That even I am able dismiss the slurring drunk words spoken next to us—
“Here’s hopin’ that you two get married some day”—
As superfluous.

.                Part Two               .

The winds above Lake Erie carry me,
Along with that lantern, into the foreignness
Which Never Sink foreshadowed.
But with the lantern as my very being
And the Puget Sound in my every breath,
Athens, Ohio does not become my soul-scape;
Even its gorgeous autumnal rolling hills
Are just land-scape, and I don’t know
Whether things would have been different
Had I not walked into that stranger’s party
For that terrible beer
On one of my first nights there, but regardless in

September
I walk up endless hills and stairs daily
To get around this hellhole where the only genuine people I’ve yet found
Were prepared to leave from day one, like I
Wasn’t. I wasn’t preparing for that at all, but the Puget Sound,
Lingers like phlegm in my lungs and distorts my regular refrain
Of “I can be happy here, I can be happy here,” keeping it
From ever loosing its hypothetical but eventually forcing it
To loose its conclusion:
I can be…
I can be…
I can be anything that I want to be and I am still here,
Sitting on the top terrace of this weird-assed biker bar with some girl
I just met, with some guy
Who seems cool, but in both cases
I drink one too many Blue Moon’s because I know
That neither of these people
Will ever loose their hypotheticals and will only ever
Loose their conclusions.
Gazing upwards towards the stars in the fading summer,
I try to ignore the physicality of all that’s around me,
But the alcohol churns in my stomach like violent waves, like in

October
How I rock like tides between the shores
Of two continents, of two
Acid trips.
One, on the floor of my dorm room, staring at my ceiling
In an attempt to make patterns
Out of patternless white paint, all the while holding hands
With that guy who seems cool, who has been dancing
In and out of hypothetical.
And the other acid trip with you,
Who somehow in the face of everything
Became one of my only certainties.
You, with whom I stood on Lake Erie
Howling into the wind in an unrealized epiphany.
An epiphany
That is now realized
Because the beers on that top terrace didn’t matter.
The white speckles on my dorm room ceiling during that first acid trip
Didn’t matter.
Hell, that girl I am in love with
Didn’t (doesn’t, can’t, won’t) matter.
What matters to me,
As I’m dressed in drag on Halloween,
Lying in your dorm room that smells of Indian food
With 120 dollars of drug money in my pocket,
Is what’s ultimately present. Right there.
Right here. But then, lying there, the time
Clicks over into

November
And at two in the morning it becomes
One in the morning.
I don’t know which of those hours wasn’t real
But when I hug you and cry in the soft light
It is a moment too brief.
It is a moment from which I am pulled straight
Into a hotel bed halfway to New York City,
Where I lie with that girl who I guess I’m in love with
And I’m kissing her, and I realize
That blue spirals still linger on my body, but when she groans,
So softly
That “we shouldn’t be doing this”
I pause before saying “I know,”
And in that pause, my pixelated, televised, and falsified image of reality
Briefly turns to fuzzy grey static, its finite infinity like the trance
Of meat on a rotisserie; I’m waiting
For this turkey to cook
In my friend’s mom’s home—funny
Because I’m still a vegetarian
Who sometimes likes to think of himself, in quest for definition,
As a vegan, but man
I’m beyond definition, I’m beyond anything,
I’m beyond even my darkest imaginings of myself, so when I get wasted
At a 2am that doesn’t click back on Thanksgiving morning,
I have a slice of that ******* turkey,
Cuz the vegan chili my friend and I made at school was good and all,
But I had to bike through freezing rain to get the peppers
And even though I’m starting to feel
Like I’ve found a few people who I can take in with permanence
Nothing feels more like permanence
Than this home-cooked meal
Of turkey and cranberries and sweet potatoes at a granite counter
Where, on January 1st when the ball dropped,
We all took shots, leaving me drunk, stumbling
And eventually
Hungover.
And of course in

December
I’m still
Hung over it all.
Part one, part two,
The futility of that division is so obvious now.
It’s the same poem, same sentence,
And when two not-so-new-anymore friends and I sit on a rooftop in Athens
With a bunch of still so-new I-guess-friends
Right before exam week,
Right before this emotionally excruciating semester comes to a close,
Right before I prepare to head home,
I realize that even though this place
Hasn’t quite become home yet,
My ‘home’ isn’t really at home now either.
I am without a bed in which I feel comfortable,
Without a body next to which my whole life makes sense,
And I am driving to go swing dancing—
An activity I can’t believe I’m still trying to like—
When I finally tell her that I’m in love with her:
Words that don’t matter despite
How much they do. Ultimately,
To me, to her, it’s just
A quick red-light phrase
And this poem is, without too many layers of resonance,
Not even addressed to her,
But to that girl with whom I stood on Lake Erie,
Howling into the wind,
Imagining part two but preparing
For part three, so
With that lantern still floating skyward, “here’s hopin’ that”—
                                         (No. No. No. Start over.)
Here’s hoping that
At midnight
On this New Year’s Eve,
When the ball drops and when we all take shots,
Perhaps around that same granite counter-top,
These clocks
Won’t click back again.
These spirals
Will fade.

Did you know,
They told you
That people were made of star-dust?

You reminded them you knew the composition
Of your molecules
Your carbon sitting in your bones like blue marrow

They reminded you of lotus moths
And bioluminescence
And the horseshoe ***** you found on your birthday

Cause you're the East Coast baby
With your West Coast dreams
And she's on the TV

Your China queen.

Like a lingering doubt,
the moon stood on the maple tree―
for a relationship.

For my sake don't take a
downside, my liberalism
will suffer.

Killed in your own house
by lightning, have you
ever heard of self-immolation?

Let's make it simple.
Take it from the giver,
what he never had― and
don't ask the price.

Your eyes again befell
a giant. How would you live
without the fireflies?

I stroke these flames,
And pat my tail,
Tapping the dust away.
I whisper to these dead flames,
And look above,
Begging for the relieve by day.
No longer do I glow in Night,
It was sudden, this cold,
And the darkness in here scares me,
The flutter of my wings echo in hollowed oak,
Making me jump,
Making me wish to rip them from this back,
If only I could reach; stretch further,
But ah! I cannot.
But as my heart took another leap,
And I saw shadows on my wooden walls,
I looked to the skies with watering eyes,
As seven billon lights floated in the night,
And the world was lit,
As if it were day.
A smile appeared to my lampyridae lips,
I was barely conscious of the wind leading me away,
I was humming a beautiful melody of my forefathers,
A song sung with the restoration of hope,
The world can light itself during dark!
They are finally here,
People! Man! **** sapiens!
And the world has lit the dark for them,
The sun is warm;
The wind is sweet, for them.
And though sad, we are happy to no longer be needed,
We love this world, but others await, dormant, eager to be lit.
So we disappear this day,
Hardly noticing the return of bioluminescence,
Etching in our memories,
Seven billion stars and the Moon's beautiful crescence.

                      Love and Light
                            from firefly

I see it in
         shades of
liquid coal
  slaking
    my aching
           thirst in
black ocean shoal
      onyx crystals
             washed up
            in tides
       of barely
    peeking,
night-lava eyes
     silently spoken
                   and through
     the waters of deep
my soul is
    waking up from
          eons of sleep
              weaving garlands
             of darkest green,
            seaweed tips
that I tenderly keep
       strewn, in chlorophyll strips  
                      across the stardust glow
                                       of my naked skin
                                     as I liquid float,
                       spirit whirring within
                              eyes bright
                in illuminated
          moonstone glow
picking up signals
of halted flow
This is needed here,
in this darkest of dark
waters abundant
with tight, broken sparks
shards of the living
and fragments of souls
                  a luminosity of darkness
                  making us whole
      And pulsing next to me
   in beauty's surprise
phosphorescent creatures,
     a feast for the eyes
           loving, gently brushing
                my outstretched fingers-
                     bioluminescence divine
                         on my body lingers
                   from jellies to squid
                to jet -hued sharks
    knifing through layers          
     of dark on dark
         within the
lush waters' quiet force
a dance in faded flicker
conjures the source
                 within the depth
                         of the depths
                            of my endlessly
                            wet
          in my darkest of dark
between blood and sweat
penetrating the mysteries
   that quake through
          this heart
         filling it up
  as it tears it apart
         smashing it
    to smithereens
   creating sutures
   of ironic healing
until through the cracks
both wide and slight
        shoots up
the flare
of my own
    inner
          light

Morning
Tastes like coffee,
The aftertaste of a childhood
Back when we paced ourselves
When a day was a day, not a complaint,
We picked up any old shell and said
‘Listen, the ocean!’
Now that we’ve grown up we know that
Its only our own hearts echoing in our ears,
Reminding us that we still have a pulse
And if you think about it,
Does it mean that we are just waves?

So I wake up thinking about how
We call it daylight savings time but the only thing we are saving is ourselves,
Preserving our subconscious in all the words we never wanted--
We erased them, but the words we do our best to make disappear
Are the ones sheltered in eraser shavings,
Brushed to the floor and tracked everywhere
On the shoes we wear from place to place,
Haunting us with the very things we are running to escape.
But pushing the clock forward an hour
Will do nothing to make you run faster
Will not hold the tide in place for you to catch
Only invalidate the time you have taken to progress

And the thirty foot jump off the pier in pitch black is worth it
For the bioluminescence that swells up around us--
Is that the daylight we misplaced
When we tried to save it?
Is it the waves or your heartbeat you hear
Trapped in the bubbles of cool night air
that we take with us as we plunge home into the ocean

silken honey dew essence ,
natural bioluminescence , Aura pulsates in time to the  flowing blood veins ,

fingertip lips taste like lightning just before it flicks the ground with his forked tongue -

stomach tingle , heart dip , drop.
lose it all , lose it again -
transfer the same -
enlarge the plane,

feel the vibrations of:  never the same , again. Expansive minds roll on ...


                                                           ­          ~~~*

Escaped moan is free, darkness turns to light.
the whispers,
   kept between you and me.

Animal instinct , Divine instinct

        slips in.
                          slips out.

carving chasms and canyons out of skin...a glint of menace  and copious amounts of mischief dance in his eyes , like a snake charmer sashaying the imaginary into existence.
                        
                      the space dew tastes....like raspberry Champagne bubbles...


the energy flows are opening now,  to handle the cosmic ******...

one must prepare -
an untrained mind , might combust -
or worse yet , attract the dijins for foolish endeavors into treasure map waters...

Sensi bows - game , set , match.

Practice makes Perfect..

I rest , slightly out of breath
Floating ...
In a little canoe carved with etched markings of ancient tradition - native - to mama earths paintbrush
Offering my naked body sleek with a slight sheen of daytime heat,
my face shadowed by the brim of a banana tree leaf sombrero ,

Lazily drifting into giant Lilly pads , lotus flowers spring up , rich sumptuous yellow suns adorned with skins of deep purple petals
Where I go , I don't know - Rivers leads the way

Curvaceous as my curls the water meanders into Lake Meru

Gently disturbing the pristine reflections of misty cloud mountains
Ripples cascade into the placid watery depths as I dock in where the river meets land , to find the seven nymphs waiting , to guide me home.

All this time , woven into a shirt that is iradeccent as the halo around lady moon as night falls across the vally.

The last drops of sunset burning orange adorn my locks ,

Fire light calls and beckons , dancing flames whisper sensual pleasures and lick my skin leaving residual memories of rooftop nights , but , today we lie on the earthen - hearth falling asleep to the cradling , rocking rhythm that is
Sacred lullaby

Notes got us high on paper wings

Leave these flesh bodies in favour

Of ethereal

And father sky's cloud kingdom - star shine
Coats each kiss in bioluminescence
Forget cloud 9 , this , I, heaven on earth

When we return , bodies paired with dew

Under the blanket of sunrise
Serene

I have drunk from the mountain stream
Clean , clear , free.

We all know that life can thrive in the most inhospitable of places.
                                             Plants grow from volcanic soil.
                                             Bioluminescence crawls beneath
                                               immense pressure on the ocean floor.
                                             Microbes most likely thrive below the icy,
                                                        radioact­ive surface of Europa.
We all know that life—love—perseveres.  
                                         ­                                 It’s nothing new.

But we don’t talk about
                                            how ******* hard that actually is.  
That’s what the strengths perspective is for.  
What resilience gives name to.  

But what if I don't want to?  What if,
                                                                ­  for today,
                                                                ­                     I’d rather the **** not?  
Is that okay?                           Is that allowed?  
That today I'm the vinca vine dying on the ledge?  
Withered up and not drinking any more water.  

Today, I am every succulent that I’ve ever accidentally killed.  
Today, I am excess formaldehyde.  I am a brain floating in a bell jar,
                        undulating in an existence that is an ethical quagmire.
Today, I am in limbo.  Purgatory.  Stasis and static.  
Suspended upside down in a frozen wasteland, Dante style.  

Tomorrow, I will thaw.  
                                Rise from the soil fist first.