Friday, 5 June 2009

Forthcoming talks

Emma's next public presentation takes place at the Fashioning an Ethical Future (FEI) book launch at London College of Fashion, London, on July 7th 2009.  


The day is now FULLY BOOKED, but national and international  Slow Textiles Group members may access her transcript after the event.

Her following public presentation will be for The Slow Textiles Group's WORKSHOP 7: July 11th 2009 - 13:30 til 16:15: 
Japanese Prints, Graphics and Patterns - with Print, Applique & Stitch on to Upcycled Fabric. 

For further details and more dates see Slow Textiles.

Monday, 27 April 2009

Technological Progress


It encourages communication. Remotely.

Fun Shopping


When you don't know who you are, you try things on for size.

Try this for some underlying shopping angst:


Monday, 30 March 2009

Expressions of Powerlessness and Paralysis


Internal distortions applied externally:

Shoes by Louis Vuitton, Spring/Summer 2009.

Foot-binding was introduced in the Sung Dynasty (AD 960-1280) and was applied across China for several reasons, one of which was "it made the women less likely to be able to succeed (Jackson 19)." (Taken from HEYOKA MAGAZINE.6.FootBinding).

For seven hundred years foot-binding was considered normal across China. It was only through shifting cultural insights that the practice was thought to be cruel and damaging.

Spring/Summer 2009 shoe trends.

Friday, 13 February 2009

Old Plastic Flowers


How quickly technologies past generate new meaning:


How fast the old and discarded become new:


Resin jewellery, USA, c.1940 - 50s.

Sunday, 25 January 2009

Playstation Sales as Barometer


The cumulative effects and affects of non-communication. 

A view on some of man's 'internal others' played out by millions of Playstation fans every day. 

The unilateral, retaliatory father.

The adolescent unable to navigate. 
Adolescent "magical thinking" enacted virtually. 
(No default setting to practise negotiation). 

The young professional, caught between the two.

Stuck in react/attack mode.

Friday, 2 January 2009

At Last, Something Sexy


Old story, new moves

Symbolic transition - the virtual needs to feel real

Friday, 19 December 2008

Book Now Available

If you're interested to learn more about my studio work with plastics and synthetics and enter a larger debate on materials and their meanings, see the final chapter in this new publication, 'Plastics: Looking at the Future and Learning from the Past' (Archetype Publishing in association with the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2008):

Friday, 3 October 2008

Projections of a Revealing Nature II

Diesel ad campaign, Live Fast, S/S 2007.

In 1899, Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. In Chapter One, he writes, "In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state."

In the same way that an artist's body of work tells an autobiographical story of their internal world and its relationship with the surrounding culture, can a corporation's body of promotional imagery recount the workings, direction, aspirations, preoccupations and projections of the corporate 'persona'?

Emma Neuberg argues that it can and, in this light, ad campaigns carry a more helpful, revealing message.

Examples and analyses on their way.

Thursday, 2 October 2008

Projections of a Revealing Nature I

Dolce&Gabbana, ad campaign (print), 2006.

Examples of where commercial constructs of women are currently at at the outset of the twenty-first century: frustrated, liable to take-over, isolated, bathed in neon light, lifeless, alone, deranged, hemmed in, looking for contact, frozen, android-like, manipulated, broken. Examples:
Dior Pure Poison Parfum, TV commercial, UK, 2007.
Dior Addict Parfum, TV commercial, France, 2006.
Dior Addict lipstick, TV commercial, 2006.
Dior Hypnotic Poison Parfum, TV commercial proposal, 2007.

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Projections of an Unhelpful Nature I

Dolce&Gabbana, fashion print campaign, S/S2007.

Feel abused; arouse abuse. In the hope of appeasing narcissistic personality disorders or expounding a societal disorder?

Tuesday, 9 September 2008

Longtime Innovating Star Maker

The Tarantula Nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074:

"On its 100,000th orbit of planet Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope peered into a small portion of the Tarantula Nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074, unveiling its stellar nursery. The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, triggered perhaps by a nearby supernova.

"The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-headed "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

"The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is slowly eroding Nebula, and another young cluster may be hidden beneath the circle of brilliant blue gas.

"The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy that is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies."

(Image Credit and text: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)).

Monday, 8 September 2008

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable - Material Projections of Good Object, Bad Object

"In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances , [plastic] figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal; it embodies none of the genuine produce of the mineral world: foam, fibres, strata. It is a shaped substance: whatever its final state, plastic keeps a flocculent appearance, something opaque, creamy and curdled, something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant smoothness of nature." Barthes, Plastic, 1957.

We have seen the Pacific Plastic Island and we have seen the animals maimed by plastic. We have yet to 'see' the polymers we ingest through fake tan, milkshakes, medication, cosmetics, food, hair products, boob jobs and nail polish.

New i phone anyone?

The plastic story has always been an emotive one, steeped as it is in the ancient conflict between truth and artifice. Are plastics natural? Is carbon natural? It's a bit like asking, are women with breast implants natural?

What is artifice? Who is deceiving whom? When does an object become parody? And what's wrong with pastiche?

Emma addresses these questions in her forthcoming essay, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable - Material Projections of Good Object, Bad Object.

Sheen and Deflection - The Semiotics of Futurism in Fashion and Textiles

Tracing a line through the work of visionaries from Marinetti to Balenciaga, this publication explores a conceptual and sartorial preoccupation with metallics, transparency, illumination, luminescence and high shine.

Aluminised polyester-laminated leather dress by Dolce & Gabbana on the front cover of Numero magazine (France), February 2007.

By examining the cultural and technological context of designs from fashion houses Courrèges to Chalayan, the author traces the development of futurist paradigms and elucidates methods for reading the myths and ideologies therein. 

"The Face of the Future - Luminous, Lovely with Elizabeth Arden's New Illusion Foundation," cosmetics ad, Nova Magazine, 1966.

The commodification of human relationships in the twentieth century and the resultant narcissistic projections evident in futurist fashion and its media representations are hinted at by one of the western world’s most celebrated designers, Hussein Chalayan. In a description of one of his collections he states: “The use of two distinct light-emitting materials was meant to suggest a flame immediately around the body and a softer glow outside – like in religious iconography where a saint is bathed in a pool of holy light.”

Such an Apollo-esque fantasy of radiant wisdom and divine transcendence is frequently central to the futurist’s vision.

Details coming..

Using examples from Tullio Crali's sketchbooks to contemporary ads, the author decodes a persistent strand of visual culture that places youthful woman at the heart of an ideal synonymous with gadget-laden, speed-heralding, language scarce, technological times. Illumination glows, throbs, flickers, flashes and becomes the means of communication. 

Giorgio Moroder's "Battlestar Galactica" vinyl record cover, with illustration by Winston Taylor, Polygram Records, 1978.

If design is the cultural assimilation of scientific advancement, then futurist fashion occupies itself with a transformation of human to cyborg, biological animal to synthetic construct with “non-human” characteristics. Decay, softness, vulnerability, spontaneity, animation and social interaction are not readily displayed.

Futurism, a school of thought associated with a reflexive dialectic of speed and control founded in the early 1900s, goes on, in sartorial terms, to arouse a robot fantasy projected on to the female form, its being and symbolic meaning.

Image details coming..

Some Video Links (for lecture visuals):
Phillips Probe Dress, 2007
Qui-etes vous Polly Magoo? (1968)
Kylie and Blue Mondays Mix
Logan's Run (1976)
Aelita - Queen of Mars (1926)
Chalayan Video Dress (2007)

(Chelsea College Students: Summary Fashion Video for first three lectures).

3D Futuro Manga, 2007

Barthes' Jet-Man - Today

Jet-man today has leisure time. At least, he has time for self-portraiture.

Astronaut Mike Fossum, self-portrait, June 3rd, 2008.

"The jet-man is a jet-pilot. 'Paris Match' has specified that he belongs to a new race in aviation, nearer to the robot than to the hero. Yet there are in the jet-man several Parsifalian residues, as we shall see shortly. But what strikes one first in the mythology of the jet-man is the elimination of speed: nothing in the legend alludes to this experience.

At 3:45 p.m. EDT on the third orbit of Earth, Ed White opened the hatch and used the hand-held manoevering oxygen-jet gun to push himself out of the capsule, June 1965.

"We must here accept a paradox, which is in fact admitted by everyone with the greatest of ease, and even consumed as a proof of modernity. This paradox is that an excess of speed turns to repose. The pilot hero was made unique by a whole mythology of speed as experience, of space devoured, of intoxicating motion; the jet-man , on the other hand, is defined by a coenaesthesis of motionlessness, as if the extravagance of his vocation precisely consisted in overtaking motion, in going faster than speed.

Tullio Cralli, Nose Dive on the City, old-fashioned "intoxicating motion", 1939.

"Mythology abandons here a whole imagery of exterior friction and enters pure coenaesthesis: motion is no longer the optical perception of points and surfaces; it has become a kind of vertical disorder, made of contractions, black-outs, terrors and faints; it is no longer a gliding but an inner devastation, an unnatural perturbation, a motionless crisis of bodily consciousness.

"No wonder if, carried to such a pitch, the myth of the aviator loses all humanism. The hero of classical speed could remain a 'gentleman', inasmuch as motion was for him an occasional exploit, for which courage alone was required: one went faster in bursts, like a daring amateur, not like a professional, one sought an 'intoxification', one came to motion equipped with an age-old moralizing which made its perception keener and enabled one to express its philosophy. It is inasmuch as speed was an adventure that it linked the airman to a whole series of human roles.


"The jet-man, on the other hand, no longer seems to know either adventure or destiny, but only a condition. Yet this condition is at first sight less human than anthropological: mythically, the jet-man is defined less by his courage than by his weight, his diet and his habits (temperance, frugality, continence). His racial apartness can be read in his morphology: the anti-G suit of inflatable nylon, the shiny helmet, introduce the jet-man into a novel type of skin in which 'even his mother would not know him'. We are dealing with a true racial conversion, all the more credible since science-fiction has already largely substantiated this metamorphosis of species: everything happens as if there had been a sudden mutation between the earlier creatures of propeller-mankind and the later ones of jet-mankind..."

All in a day's work: Robert L. Behnken, STS-123 mission specialist, instals a spare-parts platform for Dextre, 2008.

Text continued in Barthes' The Jet-man, (Mythologies), 1957.

David Bowie's Space Oddity video (1969).


Squares and Matrices - The Semiotics of Modernism in Fashion and Textiles

This lecture introduces Modernism and Semiotics and their meeting place in twentieth and twenty-first century fashion, textiles and appearances.

Tracing a line through the work of visionaries from Giacomo Balla to Jonathan Saunders, it explores a sartorial preoccupation with geometric pattern, graphic line and superflat colour.

Miss Sixty ad, 2004.

By examining the cultural and technological context of designs from designers Sonja Delaunay to Criminal Damage, the lecture elucidates the evolution of modernist print, garment construction and their media representations along with methods for reading the underlying theoretical dynamics.

Using examples from Bauhaus sketchbooks to contemporary ads, the lecturer decodes a strand of visual culture that places youthful woman at the heart of a modern yet anxious ideal. The individuals who wear the clothes are, of course, unconsciously expressing this tension.

Max Mara ad, 2005.

Modernism, the design school of thought perpetuated at the Bauhaus, is associated with a dialectic of material integrity with purity of form. Incorporated into fashion, modernist motifs act out their integral conflict on the female form. Semiotic and critical theories are explored to help students grasp the deeper signifiers with examples from 1919 to the present day.

Plastic disc dress, Gareth Pugh, featured in Vogue (UK), A/W'07.

Video examples:

Peggy Moffitt, (1963), fashion examples.

Flora and Flight - The Semiotics of Naturalism in Fashion and Textiles



A study of flora in fashion and textiles and its media representation from 1950 to the present day is underway.


Sunday, 7 September 2008

Fashioning the Synthetic Body


Tanya, the silicon doll, is selling well, Realdoll, The World's finest Love Doll.

Lecture on the future of synthetics to be uploaded soon.

Hip Plastic - Skeletal Reproductions


Plastic hips. Skeletal reproduction via Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Rapid-Prototyping Technology http://ablesw.com/3d-doctor/.

Reflections in skeletal self-portraiture..

Saturday, 6 September 2008

Ruffles and Regression - The Semiotics of Romanticism in Fashion and Textiles


Chanel No.5, tv commercial, 2007.