Entwistle describes how each culture demands its own dress, whether clothing, tattooing, body art or cosmetics – these conventions transform the flesh into something palatable to society, pushing the body into a semantic discourse it is otherwise is absent from. For Entwistle, dress does not merely cover modesty or reflect the natural body but it is crucial to the microsocial order. (from  ‘abstract’ of article)

Conventions of dress transform flesh into something recognizable and meaningful to a culture and are also the means by which bodies are made “decent,” appropriate and acceptable within specific contexts. Dress does not merely serve to protect our modesty and does not simply reflect a natural body or, for that matter, a given identity; it embellishes the body, the materials commonly used adding a whole array of meanings to the body that would otherwise not be there.

I sketch out a theoretical framework that takes as its starting-point the idea that dress is an embodied practice, a situated bodily practice that is embedded within the social world and fundamental to microsocial order (Entwistle 2000a). While emphasizing the social nature of dress, this framework also asserts the idea that individuals/subjects are active in their engagement with the social and that dress is thus actively produced through routine practices directed towards the body. In order to capture this sense of dress as both socially structured and embodied and practical, I shall draw on a wide range of theoretical resources.

The main discussion will focus on the uses and limitations of both the structuralist and post-structuralist approaches, since these have been influential in recent years in the sociological study of the body. In part- icular, the work of Mary Douglas (1973, 1984), Marcel Mauss (1973) and Michel Foucault (1977, 1986) offers fruitful insights into the way in which the body is rendered meaningful by culture. However, such approaches are limited when it comes to acknowledging the “fleshy” body and its experiential dimensions. They also neglect to account for how structures and rules result in actual embodied practices, sometimes with the effect of reducing individuals to puppet-like actors. In contrast, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1976, 1981), which begins with the idea of the body as the “existential ground of culture” (Csordas 1993), is suggestive of the ways in which dress can be understood as an embodied practice. These theoretical traditions may seem at odds with one another; and indeed, according to Crossley (1996), they have been considered incommensurable by some. However, as he argues, they offer different and complementary insights into the body and embodiment in society. Following Crossley (1995a, 1995b, 1996) and also Csordas (1993, 1996), I shall argue that an account of dress as a situated bodily practice can draw on the insights of these two different traditions, struc- turalism and phenomenology, and indeed must do so. Dress as both a social and a personal experience is a discursive and practical phenomenon

An autographic visualisation of pollution in various areas of a city

It frames pollution by producing a way to measure the speed dust recollects on a given surface.

• is this form of expressing an issue maybe more powerful / potent than a graph or a new article?
• will it intersect with more individuals?
• would it ever change behaviour?

• (subtle but maybe relevant link – my grey zone project of second year ESCAPE brief. refereed to treatment of objects + dust as symbolic treatment / interaction…
  • which I guess is then also a bit linked to the development of that project that focused on the textural experience when interacting with materiality in a sensorial way..)

Article from MEDIUM website

Endeavours to see data as something physcial

autographic visualisation is just finding ways to guide INTERPRETATION of a material trace

AUTOGRAPHIC = self-inscribing

anything can be a trace in the right context. its more about framing than mapping…

the interpretation of a traces is still often the result of a particular method of measurement (/methodology?)

Many public controversies — about the nature of climate change, the implications of environmental pollution, or polls in a presidential election — are about how these datasets were collected; whether they are trustworthy and accurately represent the phenomena they describe. While the methods of data visualization excel at revealing patterns in data, they are less useful for addressing methodological debates about the nature and origins of data.

Autographic visualization is a set of techniques for revealing visible traces and guiding their interpretation. Instead of mapping data to visual variables, the designer sets the conditions that allow a trace to emerge. 

• (as identified on in the article) how does visualisations such as
  • autographic
  • scientific
  • data
• with semiotic distinctions (as shown in the indexical design talk shown below)
  • symbolic
  • iconic
  • symbolic ???

The symposium explores the physical trace and its role for making sense of the world. We will investigate the different scientific, aesthetic, and rhetoric techniques for making traces “speak.” In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiology, indexicality refers to the causal connection between an object and its effects in the real world: dyed bacterial cultures in a petri dish, the chemical signatures of pollutants in the environment, the wear on the pages of a book. Indexicality connects the abstract domain of information with bodily experience.

‘geologists consider the geological strata as an archival record whose arrangements express a temporal order.…’

• feel as though data/scientific visuals have potential to be ‘truthy’ (tim morton) and therefore am curious by integration of trace framing/autographic visualisation (AS A TOOL) with the future or dress.
  • what then would this mean for ‘fashion’? possible new ‘fetishisation’ of gadget-like objects.
  • picturing weird syntho-organic ornaments that unintentionally turned into the contemporary (maybe here find a good word for the port² modernism?) Apple of today..

• is autographic visualisations useful when being used on a forum such as ornamentation? In the case of POST CARBON LAB the sequestering microbial textiles indirectly have the potential to be autographical. Observe the existing traces (‘reframe’ via data collection esque lens) – microbial could maybe manipulated to hold a literal code for something in our environment.

• Dietmar Offenhuber also wrote an article on on autographic visualisations amongst the pandemic.

• is maybe why I’ve started thinking about permanent pandemic possibilities
• ESPECIALLY interesting as the vaccine race is because more politicised – not least because its a ‘race’, but also as he information has been released right after the Biden-harris election results.
• still… hygiene / fear / polarisation (both social and physically ie. vulnerable and the not) / distancing (again, culturally and physically)

An interesting and growing area involves the design of smart materials with autographic properties, with many applications such as 4d printing, micro-fluidic robots, or the use and manipulation of bacteria to visualize environmental properties. !!!!!!!!!!!

Writer of Material Witnesses. Uses a sort of speculative realist approach to understanding agency of the non-human. It re imagines and ‘re informs’ materialists existence in the ‘dialogue’ of accountability. She also outlines new definitions for information, evidence, matter and ‘event’.

Material witness is, in effect, a Möbius-like concept that continually twists between divulging “evidence of the event” and exposing the “event of evidence.”

It’s a theory of representation (and visualisation?) that is linguistically and terminologically anthropomorphic. It’s linked to other speculative realists so I am interested as to what its links with anthropomorphising is?

For me, Schuppi references the desensitising nature of ‘disaster’ media coverage. This is something referenced by Rob Nixon in his ‘slow violence’ thesis – the relevance of temporalities variation in terms of social media informed human attention span vs. violent acts of ecological damage.

It makes me ask questions of how the visualisations are accessed/location/what forum? Is it the Gallery or is it governmental?