RESEARCH
The Evolution of Dress through Devices
Fabric Structures as the Earliest Intellectual Tools of the Body
Early Western aristocratic dress did more than display social rank. It operated as a system of devices that physically manipulated the human body. Corsets redistributed internal pressure through whalebone and metal inserts, panniers and crinolines expanded silhouettes with wooden and wire frames, and concealed stays supported the spine and torso. Padding, framing, and hinge based elements altered bodily proportions and produced entirely new shapes. These mechanisms were not decorative additions but functional technologies designed to restructure the body. In this sense, dress began as a structural apparatus engineered through textile based knowledge.
During the Renaissance and Baroque eras, the hidden architecture of clothing grew increasingly complex. Beneath outward elegance, interior structures performed the work of mechanical design. The padded doublet reshaped the ribcage and projected authority by thrusting the torso forward, fixed shoulder constructions elevated and stabilized the upper body like a supportive frame, and the bustle acted as a lever that redistributed weight toward the back. Lower garments inflated the hips and legs to create exaggerated balances that could not exist without engineered support. The geometric silhouettes of these periods emerged from principles of pressure, leverage, and load distribution rather than mere stylistic preference.
Long before the rise of industrial machinery, textile production served as a primary site of technical advancement. High density weaving was protected as strategic knowledge, and the integration of wire with fabric produced the earliest mechanical structures. Techniques of tension modulation evolved through lacework and corsetry, while pannier and crinoline engineering refined methods of distributing weight and stabilizing form. Fabric was never a simple material. It was a technology designed to control structure and movement. Dress functioned as early applied human engineering.
The mechanical evolution of dress represented one of humanity’s earliest attempts to reorganize perception, social hierarchy, and material form through technology. These garments reconfigured bodily awareness, visualized power relations, and integrated physical principles into wearable silhouettes. Structure demanded an understanding of force and motion that anticipated formal disciplines of mechanics. Clothing became a site where sensory experience, cultural meaning, and technical exploration converged.
Exaggerated structures and uncomfortable silhouettes were driven by the social and political forces of their time, yet they also served as experimental devices that invented new forms of balance and sensation. Through this iterative process, fashion developed an expanding archive of pressure control, joint construction, and tension modulation. By extending the space surrounding the body and redesigning its proportions and limits, these systems revealed the vast structural potential embedded within textiles.
Unfamiliar silhouettes and awkward devices return us to fundamental questions of design: how do we test new forms and expand perception. When comfort becomes the sole criterion, our understanding of the body becomes flattened. Discomfort urges us to feel the body again and to reimagine how human form can move, occupy space, and evolve.
Textile has long operated as a structural craft that internalizes personal experience, social order, and cultural meaning. Originating as a handmade technique, it progressively developed into an engineering system capable of reorganizing the human body and the spatial relations surrounding it. The history of dress can therefore be understood as a continuous process through which societies have explored the body’s potential for transformation and extension by means of wearable structures.
This historical trajectory reveals a consistent direction. Technologies that emerge from garment construction do not remain confined to aesthetic or ornamental domains. Rather, they advance into mechanisms that determine how human beings inhabit space, sustain movement, and engage with their environments. The structural experiments of dress, accumulated through centuries of adjustment and refinement, form a body of knowledge concerned with stability, balance, force distribution, and perceptual organization.
As technological development increasingly centers on the design of devices that interface directly with the body in contexts such as wearable systems, protective equipment, and robotic augmentation, the relevance of this knowledge becomes more explicit. Devices that operate as extensions of the human body cannot be reduced to criteria of functional efficiency alone. They must incorporate the cultural memory and sensorimotor intelligence that have historically shaped bodily identity. The evolution of clothing demonstrates how structures worn on the body have continuously negotiated between technical necessity and the lived experience of human form.
In this respect, dress represents one of civilization’s earliest attempts to articulate a technological understanding of the body. It has served both as a mechanism for structuring appearance in relation to social organization and as an experimental site for testing how the physical and conceptual boundaries of the body may be redefined. The ongoing movement from craft to engineering suggests that the technological foundations embedded in textile-based construction hold the capacity to inform future domains in which the body must be reimagined as a dynamic interface.
Viewed historically, dress has never functioned as a mere decorative element, but as a structural laboratory for testing how human existence can be expanded. Operating as a device that mediates between the body and the world, it provides essential insight into how technological forms may shape the future conditions of living. The study of dress therefore contributes not only to aesthetic history, but also to a structural understanding of how the human body may be technologically extended, organized, and redefined.
Through this process, the human body has been repeatedly reconfigured as a technological interface.
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Wearable and Wearing
Defining Wearing as a Biological and Social Strategy
Contemporary discussions of fashion and wearable technology tend to prioritize the notion of wearability. Comfort, efficiency, usability, and ergonomic optimization are commonly treated as the primary criteria by which clothing or body-integrated devices are evaluated. While these considerations are undeniably important, they address only one aspect of dress: how well an object conforms to the body. What remains insufficiently examined is a more fundamental distinction between wearable and wearing, a distinction that does not concern objects alone, but actions, survival logic, and the relational conditions of bodily existence.
Wearable refers to an object-centered evaluation. It describes the degree to which a garment or device minimizes physical resistance, reduces discomfort, and integrates smoothly with bodily movement. From this perspective, the ideal form of dress would be the lightest, softest, and least restrictive option available. If physical comfort were the sole criterion, human beings could simply wear the most functionally efficient garments at all times. Yet this has never been the case across cultures or historical periods.
Wearing, by contrast, is not a property of an object but a behavior enacted by a living body. It describes an active biological and social process rather than a passive condition of use. From a biological standpoint, many species engage in behaviors that involve carrying, attaching, or displaying objects or structures that exceed immediate functional necessity. Male animals often bear exaggerated physical extensions such as plumage, antlers, or external appendages that increase visibility or signal strength, even when these features impose energetic or mechanical costs. These behaviors appear inefficient when measured by comfort or mobility alone, yet they persist because they serve higher-order survival priorities.
Human dress operates within a similar logic, though its stakes extend beyond reproduction into complex social systems. Clothing mediates visibility, authority, threat, belonging, and distance. The choice to wear something restrictive, heavy, visually assertive, or even uncomfortable is rarely arbitrary. It reflects a form of physical reasoning enacted through the body, in which immediate bodily ease is subordinated to long-term psychological, social, or symbolic survival.
This distinction becomes clearer when considering the nature of human social space. The space between individuals is neither fully private nor fully public. It is an exposed and negotiated field that remains open to interpretation, judgment, and potential risk. Clothing functions within this interstitial zone as a form of declaration. Uniforms, ceremonial dress, protective gear, and even everyday stylistic decisions operate as social membranes that establish psychological boundaries, signal intent, and regulate relational distance. To wear a particular form is to construct a temporary perimeter around the body, shaping how it enters shared space and how it is perceived by others.
From this perspective, clothing cannot be reduced to comfort alone. Mental and social survival demand structures that exceed ergonomic optimization. Wearing is therefore not simply the act of covering the body, but the act of organizing the body’s relationship to space, society, and threat. It is a form of physical reasoning through which the body negotiates its position within a shared and potentially unstable environment.
This framework becomes increasingly relevant as contemporary design shifts toward body-integrated systems such as wearable technologies, protective equipment, and augmented interfaces. Devices that operate as extensions of the human body cannot be evaluated solely through functional efficiency or usability metrics. They must also account for the accumulated sensorimotor intelligence and cultural memory embedded in how bodies have historically navigated space through dress. Long before digital interfaces or mechanical augmentation, textile structures already functioned as devices that redistributed pressure, altered posture, expanded bodily boundaries, and reshaped social perception.
Understanding wearing as physical reasoning allows dress to be reconsidered as one of civilization’s earliest technological systems. These structures did not merely decorate the body; they actively reorganized it. Rather than replacing the concept of wearability, this perspective precedes and conditions it. Wearability asks how well an object fits the body. Wearing asks why bodies choose to carry structures that transform their relation to the world.
From this standpoint, fashion is not confined to surface, texture, or stylistic expression. While many designers explore spatial creativity within fabric thickness, material finish, or silhouette, others extend wearing outward into architecture, environment, or installation-based practices. These variations reflect different thresholds of how far wearing can expand into space, yet they share a common foundation: clothing as an active system through which the body reasons physically, socially, and structurally.
In this sense, wearing is not a secondary outcome of design but a primary condition of human survival and social existence. It precedes questions of optimization, usability, or comfort by addressing how the body positions itself within shared and exposed social space. Recognizing the distinction between wearable and wearing allows dress to be understood not merely as an object fitted to the body, but as a relational structure through which the body negotiates its relationship with society and environment.
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Wearing as a Biological Tactic of the Body
Embodied Practice in Merleau-Ponty and Michel de Certeau
Human survival has never depended on cognition alone, but on the body’s capacity to negotiate its environment through strategy. Across biological systems, organisms extend, modify, or compensate for bodily limits by incorporating external structures into their physical interface. Camouflage, mimicry, and environmental attachment function not as symbolic gestures but as embodied tactics that enable survival within exposed and contested spaces. From this perspective, wearing can be understood not as a cultural aftereffect, but as a fundamental biological strategy through which the body reorganizes its relation to the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body provides a critical foundation for this understanding. Rejecting Cartesian dualism, Merleau-Ponty defines the body not as an object in space but as the condition through which space becomes perceptible and inhabitable. Perception is not the passive reception of information but an active bodily engagement with a field of possibilities. Meaning arises through posture, movement, orientation, and sensorimotor adjustment rather than abstract cognition. The body functions as an operative structure that continuously recalibrates its relation to its surroundings. Within this framework, wearing is not secondary to perception; it directly alters the body’s spatial reach, thresholds, and modes of engagement, thereby reshaping how the world is encountered.
Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday practice further clarifies this bodily logic. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes between abstract space and lived place, arguing that walking is not mere locomotion but a tactical practice through which the body reconfigures space prior to conceptual understanding. Walking inscribes rhythm, trajectory, and intention into an environment, transforming it from a geometric grid into a lived territory. This tactical bodily operation precedes representation. Wearing operates through the same logic. Like walking, it is a pre-symbolic practice that organizes relations through use. Clothing structures posture, conditions movement, and establishes relational boundaries, producing social space not through interpretation but through bodily action.
Certain species of crabs, such as decorator crabs, attach shells, algae, or surrounding debris to their bodies as a strategy of protection and survival. These organisms compensate for the limitations of their biological bodies by incorporating external materials into their bodily interface, effectively extending their physical presence into the environment. This behavior does not function as ornamentation but as a tactical adjustment to ecological and social pressures. The body, in this case, is not a closed biological unit but an adaptive structure that reorganizes itself through material attachment. Wearing, understood in this way, operates as a biological strategy prior to symbolic meaning.
The emergence of clothing in human history marks a decisive evolutionary threshold. The act of covering the body introduced a new layer of bodily strategy, enabling not only protection from climate but regulation of social exposure. The biblical narrative of shame, often misread as moral allegory, may instead be understood as the moment when the body becomes aware of its vulnerability within a social field. To wear is to acknowledge exposure and to construct a tactical boundary in response. This boundary is neither purely biological nor purely cultural. It is a material interface through which social survival becomes possible.
From this perspective, wearing constitutes a form of physical reasoning. Physical reasoning does not denote conscious calculation but the body’s capacity to organize experience through material adaptation to constraint, resistance, and risk. The body reasons by adjusting itself. Wearing introduces structured modifications into this process, redistributing force, controlling visibility, conditioning movement, and shaping relational distance. It operates alongside walking as a tactical practice through which the body produces space rather than merely occupying it. Grounded in the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and de Certeau, wearing emerges as a primary bodily strategy through which perception, social relation, and survival are physically negotiated.
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Activating the Hidden Codes of the Joint
The Joint as Bridge and Accelerator for Technological Evolution
The joint is not a secondary mechanism introduced to improve comfort or facilitate movement. It is a structural condition through which a closed body becomes capable of engaging the world. Human movement cannot be reduced to kinematics alone; it is a continuous process of spatial interpretation, force negotiation, and anticipatory adjustment. The joint constitutes the primary site where this process becomes materially organized. As such, it operates simultaneously as a bridge connecting internal structure to external space and as an accelerator that intensifies the body’s capacity to interact, transform, and respond to its environment. A joint can be understood as a dimensional interface through which embodied reasoning is translated into structural behavior.
The “hidden codes” embedded within the joint do not refer to metaphorical symbolism or aesthetic complexity. They denote latent structural information encoded through transitions between dimensional layers. In wearable systems, material originates as a two-dimensional substrate. Fabric, pattern, and surface logic exist first as planar information fields containing orientation, density, tension, and folding potential. These codes do not disappear when material enters three-dimensional space. Instead, they are selectively activated through folding, articulation, and assembly. The joint is the primary site where this 2D information is translated into 3D behavior through repeated cycles of compression and release.
Crucially, three-dimensional structure should not be understood as a terminal state. From a future-oriented technological perspective, 3D form itself functions as a coded manifestation of higher-dimensional conditions. Just as 2D patterns encode the potential of 3D structure, 3D articulation contains latent information corresponding to temporal, adaptive, and responsive dimensions often described as 4D. These higher-order conditions cannot be accessed uniformly across a structure. They emerge only where transformation is permitted without structural collapse. The joint is the only region where such transformation is structurally sanctioned, making it the locus through which higher-dimensional information becomes operational.
This understanding aligns with philosophical accounts of embodied cognition. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the body is not an object occupying space but the condition through which space becomes intelligible. Movement precedes reflection and functions as a pre-conceptual mode of thought. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactic further clarifies how bodily action generates meaning within imposed spatial systems. The joint is where these principles materialize. It is the anatomical and structural point at which the strategic organization of the body encounters the tactical demands of lived space, producing adaptive intelligence through articulation.
From an engineering standpoint, this positions the joint as the highest-density site of physical reasoning. Physical reasoning does not originate in abstract modeling or symbolic calculation but in repeated bodily resolution of force, resistance, balance, and deformation. At the joint, compression, torsion, folding, release, and recovery occur not sequentially but concurrently. To engineer a joint is therefore to formalize accumulated bodily intelligence into a repeatable structural logic. This logic governs not only motion but also stability over time, fatigue resistance, and the preservation of structural identity under transformation.
Conventional garment construction has historically treated joints as liabilities to be minimized. Ease allowances, elastic materials, and structural simplification have been employed to accommodate movement by reducing constraint. While effective for basic wearability, these approaches externalize physical reasoning to material compliance rather than internalizing it as structural intelligence. A joint designed through physical reasoning operates under a different paradigm. It preserves structural coherence while permitting controlled transformation. Folding occurs without collapse, articulation occurs without loss of load continuity, and recovery occurs without rigid fixation. Such behavior emerges only when articulation is conceived as a system of rules governing spatial transition rather than as a localized solution.
Within wearable systems, an engineered joint functions not as a passive connector but as an active mediator of motion. Movement passing through a joint is modulated, redistributed, and translated into spatial effect. As articulation becomes structurally explicit, garments begin to synchronize with bodily motion rather than merely accommodating it. This synchronization establishes a feedback loop in which the body informs structural behavior and structure, in turn, conditions bodily action. At this stage, clothing ceases to function as a surface layer and operates instead as an interface system.
The folded space within the joint represents latent potential rather than absence. What is folded is not emptiness but a reservoir of conditional behaviors awaiting activation under specific spatial and temporal demands. To unfold a joint is to activate these stored codes and bring them into operation. In this sense, concentrating technological development at the joint is not an incremental refinement but a strategic decision. It is at this point of articulation that dimensional codes are activated, where physical reasoning becomes technically realizable, and where wearable systems acquire the capacity to evolve beyond static form. The joint is therefore not a functional detail but the foundational key through which bodily thought is translated into technological evolution.
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Craig Green’s Structural Logic in Garment Engineering
The Modern Reinterpretation of Historical Dress Technologies
Clothing is one of the oldest intellectual and technical structures created by humankind. It protects the body, assigns social meaning, and mediates the relationship between human beings and the world. These functions have historically developed through two foundational technological systems. The first is craft, a set of techniques in which natural materials are repeated, joined, and patterned to create garments and everyday structures. The second is fabric structure, the technical manipulation of textiles to support form and organize space. These two systems have underpinned dressmaking across cultures, appearing in traditional garments, the internal frameworks of aristocratic dress, and the hidden structural devices in modern ready-to-wear.
Craig Green’s work begins with a modern structural reinterpretation of this historical technological lineage. His early collections employ the Fold–Dye–Unfold technique, transforming traditional dyeing practices into structural principles embedded within the pattern itself. The Linear Quilted Panels introduce repeated straight-line quilting to construct panel-based, assemblable forms. These methods are not simple aesthetic experiments. They demonstrate how the operational logic of traditional dressmaking can be translated into a new structural vocabulary. Over time, these principles expanded to form the architectural framework of his collections and installations, providing the technical basis for Green’s dual engagement with fashion and spatial practice.
A fashion designer is fundamentally a maker who works with fabric as a primary material, shaping structures that combine function, form, and cultural meaning. Through Fold–Dye–Unfold, Green extends the craft-based production of texture, imprint, and material variation. Through Linear Quilted Panels, he transforms clothing from an individual garment into an assemblable structure and eventually into a form of social exoshell that defines boundaries and articulates space. These two frameworks became the foundation for the structural experiments he continued to pursue each season. They enabled a wide range of cultural and technical variations.
An especially significant aspect of his work is that these structural approaches move beyond garment construction and evolve into a pattern language that reorganizes space, behavior, and the relationship between the individual and society. The Fold–Dye–Unfold technique treats folding and unfolding as a means of generating surface pattern, but the act also reflects a fundamental human spatial algorithm: the construction of personal space and its expansion into the social sphere. This logic mirrors the assembling and collapsing of a tent, opening and closing protective boundaries, or adjusting spatial thresholds through bodily gestures. Through such structural patterning, Green’s work reveals clothing as more than a membrane that covers the body. It becomes a device that reflects behavioral zones, cultural forms, and collective spatial practices. In this sense, his approach aligns with installation art’s concern with temporal and spatial layers, raising deeper questions about how clothing reorganizes relationships between the individual, society, and environment.
Green’s work is distinct from the sculptural exaggeration seen in much of contemporary fashion. While many designers distort the silhouette to achieve visual experimentation, their forms often lack direct connection to the technological foundations of dress history. Green, in contrast, begins with the historical legacies of fabric structure and craft and uses them to explore how far clothing can be structurally expanded. His constructions rest on a deep understanding of traditional techniques. They demonstrate that clothing can be reinterpreted not merely as a formal expression but as a structural, cultural, and functional apparatus.
This structural logic becomes even more evident in the Moncler Genius project. Through panelization and fold–unfold principles, Green developed outer-shell structures that integrate function with sculptural form. These structures simultaneously generate pattern, expand spatial presence, and alter behavioral possibilities. Given that panel-based construction is a fundamental design unit in architecture and product engineering, Green’s approach can be understood as proposing a universal structural module that can function beyond fashion. The fold–unfold method embeds a programmed form within the material and serves as an exploration of textile’s latent geometry, its inherent structural potential. However, Craig Green is not a researcher in applied science. His work shows technological potential, yet it remains entirely within the language and context of fashion. Although he enlarges the structural possibilities of fabric and craft, he does not extend these principles into a goal-oriented technical system or integrate them into scientific or engineering domains. His practice is therefore best understood as a principle-driven experiment rather than an applied technological framework.
In conclusion, Craig Green’s work provides a significant example of how historical dress technologies can gain new structural and cultural meaning through modern reinterpretation. His patterns, panels, and folding structures reveal that clothing is not merely a sculptural object but also a cultural technology and a structural device that shapes behavior and space. Although Green himself does not push these principles into applied science, the structural vocabulary he has created remains a valuable conceptual foundation that can be reexamined and reactivated across disciplines. Ultimately, his work positions clothing as a complex structure that encompasses gestures, spatial logic, social boundaries, and cultural patterns, marking an important point of reference for any modern study of the technological lineage of dress.
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This article reflects the author’s independent analysis and interpretation. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Craig Green or his associated entities.
The Boundary Between the Individual and Society
A Spatial Reading of Umberto Boccioni and the Garment as Social Space and Psychological Boundary
Umberto Boccioni’s sculptural practice provides a critical framework for examining the relationship between the individual, society, and the formation of space. His work positions space not as an inert background but as an active field shaped by the interaction between the moving body and its surrounding environment. Through this perspective, spatial form emerges from dynamic engagement rather than passive containment.
In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni rejects the classical conception of sculpture as a static representation of mass and volume. The work extends beyond the depiction of the human figure and becomes an articulation of how motion produces spatial definition. The figure advances through space while simultaneously generating new spatial configurations. In this way, the sculpture demonstrates that the individual is constituted not by fixed boundaries but by the continuous process of movement.
The interstitial zones surrounding the figure function as both personal domains and socially exposed environments. These intermediate spaces are not empty regions between forms. They represent the shifting boundary in which selfhood is negotiated through bodily trajectory. Boccioni’s emphasis on the continuous modulation of form shows that the boundary between the individual and society is not predetermined. It is produced through dynamic interaction and continually reconstituted through movement.
Central to Boccioni’s contribution is the repositioning of sculpture from a focus on physical mass to an inquiry into spatial transformation. His works construct space through the force of motion and reveal a reciprocal relationship between body and environment. The figure does not inhabit a preexisting spatial container. It generates the spatial field through its advance and forms new relations that extend beyond its physical limits. Movement becomes not a fleeting visual effect but a structural principle capable of reshaping spatial organization, identity, and social relations. His sculptures reveal that space is continuously produced by the actions of bodies and that this production influences how individuals perceive themselves in relation to the collective. Through this dynamic understanding, Boccioni presents a model in which movement acts as a formative agent in the ongoing construction of both personal and social identity.
This perspective aligns closely with STARSICA MODULAR’s research on the expansion of personal space. Human space is rarely confined to a closed private interior. It is usually open, exposed, and continually intersecting with others. Within such an open spatial structure, individuals must constantly negotiate between protection and exposure, between defense and openness. These negotiations become the aesthetic, psychological, and cultural architecture of a society. Just as the octopus regulates its distributed nervous system to respond instantly to environmental shifts, humans adjust their psychological boundaries through sensory perception and movement. Boccioni’s work gives sculptural visibility to this perpetual vibration and reconfiguration of the contact zone between self and environment.
Within this framework, clothing is not a passive exterior layer. It operates as an active device through which individuals regulate, articulate, and project their presence in social space. A uniform that signifies collective identity becomes a symbolic shield that offsets external threat. Garments that emphasize individuality or assertiveness extend one’s boundary outward as an expressive gesture. Clothing functions as both a psychological foundation and an immediate defensive mechanism within an open social field. These functions produce distinct aesthetic grammars in each historical era.
To analyze dress is therefore not simply to decode form. It is to trace the underlying structure of a given period, including its psychological tensions, its social arrangements, and the evolving boundary between the individual and society. Through Boccioni’s spatial theory, clothing becomes a site in which personal identity, social negotiation, and spatial production converge. It reveals how movement and interaction continually reshape the contours of human experience.
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Folding and Unfolding as the Structural Logic of Layers
Folding, Matter, and the Emergence of Dimensional Structure
Two dimensions are often mistaken for a simplified reality. Yet 2D is not a lesser space; it is an informational field defined by two independent axes, x and y, where latent spatial structures are stored. In this domain, drawings, patterns, scores, and blueprints operate not as flat images but as codes that specify how future space may unfold. Lines and curves hold no volume on their own, yet they contain rules of folding, rotation, and extension: an algorithm of compressed space that anticipates physical form.
Three dimensions add one more axis: z. With this addition, volume, mass, density, and gravity emerge, shaping the physical characteristics of the phenomenal world. When a 2D pattern encounters material, the line stands, bends, and folds into three-dimensional structure. This transition is not a simple enlargement but a shift in which new spatial properties arise from increased dimensionality. A schematic drawn on paper becomes capable of holding, resisting, enclosing, and acting within the world.
Yet even 3D space is not complete. Although we live among length, width, and height, hidden dimensions remain folded within experience. Intangible structures such as social norms, relationships, identity, and emotion operate as additional layers on top of physical geometry. A room is a physical container, but it also encodes power dynamics, stores affect, and directs behavior. Space becomes a social and cognitive field rather than a neutral volume.
Modern theoretical physics reinforces this view. String theory and related frameworks propose that the universe contains additional dimensions that remain imperceptible because they are folded into extremely small scales. These compact layers are not absent; they influence the behavior of matter and the structure of physical forces. What we observe is the unfolded portion of a much deeper dimensional architecture.
Dimensional thinking within fashion requires more than digital precision or computational modeling. The act of folding, cutting, joining, and testing fabric by hand is itself a form of physical reasoning: a process in which the body, the material, and spatial intuition interact. When developing modular components for garments, a 3D-printed part or AI-generated form may achieve technical accuracy, yet these are fixed solutions. By contrast, when paper-folding methods are applied to clothing, they enable structures that can shift, adapt, and transform according to context, allowing them to evolve into highly complex forms. A fold is not simply a shape but a rule that governs multiple future configurations. This rule cannot be accessed purely through abstract design; it emerges only through direct manipulation, correction, resistance, and adjustment. Engineering, in this sense, is not a distant scientific discipline but a tactile negotiation with matter.
This logic mirrors innovations seen across advanced engineering fields. Origami-based wheels for planetary rovers, for example, are not created by the same knowledge that launches rockets. The capacity to reach Mars does not automatically grant the capacity to design a wheel that must collapse, expand, and endure an alien surface. Similarly, recent developments in artificial-muscle textiles or woven kinetic fabrics arise not from algorithmic imagination but from hands physically weaving tension, direction, and friction into form. Reality-resonant solutions require contact with reality. This is why clothing, though often dismissed as craft, holds a unique industrial capacity: its creative power comes from the small-scale laboratory of the hand, where structural intelligence emerges through embodied experimentation rather than pure abstraction.
Creation, therefore, can be understood as the engineering of dimensional release: a process that prepares the conditions for crossing layers and allowing hidden structures to unfold. When hidden dimensions open, new forms of space emerge through sensing what is concealed and translating it into lived reality. In this sense, a creative approach is the capacity to perceive these layered potentials and convert them into spatial, material, and experiential form.
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Formwork as a Process Model of Thought
An Applied Framework for Experimental Thinking and Spatial Organization Between Bodies
Clothing has traditionally been understood as an object that covers the body. Within this framework, design discourse has primarily focused on surface, silhouette, and symbolism, examining how garments appear, how identities are encoded, and how clothing circulates as a cultural commodity. While these approaches have generated extensive discussions around representation and meaning, they remain insufficient for understanding clothing as a spatial and operative system that actively mediates between the body, its environment, and time. Clothing has largely been treated as a finished form, while the spatial, physical, and temporal processes activated through its use have been considered secondary.
This research departs from a different premise. Clothing does not function merely as an object, but as a device. More precisely, clothing operates as a provisional structure that organizes space between the body and its surroundings, regulates the flow of force, and permits transformation through use and duration. In this sense, clothing does not aim to stabilize form or present a finalized outcome. Instead, it establishes the conditions under which form may emerge, shift, and be reconfigured.
To articulate this mode of operation, the research adopts the architectural concept of formwork as a central applied principle. Formwork is not introduced as a historical reference, a theoretical metaphor, or a response to existing disciplinary discourse. It is employed as a practical and conceptual tool through which experimental thinking can be made operative. Formwork is selected because it offers an optimized way to translate abstract structural ideas into concrete, testable conditions across multiple forms of practice.
In construction, formwork is a temporary system used to define spatial boundaries before material solidifies. It is not designed for visual expression, nor intended to remain once a structure is completed. Its role is to control pressure, maintain volume, and guide the formation of space during a transitional process. What formwork produces is not form itself, but the conditions that allow form to occur.
Once formwork is removed, what remains is not the structure, but its trace. Seams, surface irregularities, and residual marks record the forces and processes that once passed through the system. These traces do not represent formwork as an object; they register its operation. In this respect, formwork functions as an applied tool for organizing experimentation rather than a device for reproducing predetermined results.
This approach is not exclusive to architecture. Similar provisional structures can be observed in biological systems, where skeletal formations emerge as adaptive responses to force, movement, and duration. In both natural and constructed contexts, such structures do not originate from a pursuit of form, but from the necessity to regulate pressure, enable movement, and sustain transformation over time. In this sense, formwork describes a logic that has already been tested across natural, architectural, and structural systems as a process through which conditions precede form.
This logic provides a critical framework for rethinking clothing beyond representation. When clothing is understood not as a completed object but as a structure that defines an otherwise invisible space between body and environment, it operates less as a result and more as a condition. Clothing does not dictate form; it delineates the range and order within which form may arise. It structures possibility rather than appearance.
From this perspective, clothing is no longer confined to the surface of the body. It functions as a temporary spatial framework that extends outward from the body, organizing relations between bodies, materials, and environments. This structure remains inherently provisional, continuously altered by movement, occupation, and time. Completion is neither expected nor required. Transformation is integral to its operation.
The principle of formwork also enables diverse experimental practices to be aligned under a shared operative logic. The same structural approach is not confined to the immediate space surrounding the body. It can be extended and synchronized across a broader field of operative spaces through objects, furniture, showroom structures, installations, and moving image. Across these contexts, the objective remains consistent: not the production of finished forms, but the construction of conditions through which space can emerge, operate, and transform.
In this sense, formwork can be applied as an operational framework that enables multiple experiments to be synchronized. It provides a common structural language through which different media, scales, and practices can be organized without requiring stylistic unity or symbolic consistency. Clothing, within this framework, is no longer understood as a surface that covers the body, but as a condition through which bodies, environments, and time converge. It is within this convergence that spatial relations are continuously formed, tested, and reconfigured.
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Allegorism and Mechanism
The Aesthetic Structure of Locking and Unlocking
The public often assumes that art can be understood simply by seeing or reading it. Yet the essence of art has always operated beyond what appears on the surface. Historically, art has not functioned as immediate expression but as a conditional device structure that opens only when specific perceptual or situational criteria are met. Rather than offering fixed meaning, art designs a locked system that activates when interpretation, perception, time, or context align.
Within this framework, two fundamental principles of art become evident.
First, allegory is a locked structure that opens only through interpretation. Works such as Aesop’s fables or ancient mythologies may seem simple, yet their meaning remains sealed within the narrative. Only the interpretive action of the reader or viewer fulfills the conditions required to unlock them. Allegory is therefore a system in which meaning arises through the operation of interpretation, not through surface presentation.
Second, mechanism is a locked structure that opens only under temporal or technical conditions. Clockworks and automata store latent motion within springs and gears, holding potential action in suspension until a specific moment triggers their release. Although mechanism governs function rather than symbolic meaning, it follows the same structural logic as allegory. Both remain closed until their required conditions are satisfied.
From this perspective, art is not a system that delivers meaning directly. It is a constructed lock in which meaning or function emerges only at the moment of activation. Art is fundamentally an aesthetics of locking, and its realization occurs through the moment of unlocking.
In this context, the present study positions STARSICA and MODULAR along the historical trajectories of allegorism and mechanism. STARSICA serves as a symbolic and narrative framework for interpreting the world, while MODULAR provides the structural and technical principles that allow this framework to operate in material reality. Their relationship resembles the way Aesop’s fables provide a language for understanding experience, while clockwork systems shape time, motion, and sequence through mechanical logic.
The world of STARSICA comes into being only through the joint construction of allegory and mechanism. Symbolic language alone is insufficient, and technical structure alone is incomplete. A coherent artistic and technological world emerges only when these two systems interlock, allowing meaning and function to open under the conditions of engagement.
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The Structural Origins of Physical Reasoning
Pre-Conceptual Conditions of Cognition
Approaches that explain the origins of human thought primarily through language, symbols, and textual systems face inherent limitations. These cultural forms emerge at relatively late stages of cognitive evolution and reflect states in which thought has already been formalized into representational structures. While textual and symbolic systems have played a central role in the transmission and accumulation of thought, they provide limited access to the conditions under which thought itself first became possible. This paper argues that an adequate account of the origins of thought requires attention to pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual conditions that precede symbolic representation.
At this pre-conceptual level, thought does not operate as a differentiated cognitive function or abstract reasoning capacity. Instead, it can be understood as a procedurally organized process that emerges through interactions among the body, the environment, and material constraints. Sensory feedback, motor coordination, and repeated engagement with environmental conditions constitute the core elements of thought at this stage. These processes indicate that experience was already being structured in systematic ways prior to conceptual articulation. Accordingly, reconstructing the emergence of thought requires a shift in focus away from conceptual products toward the bodily and material conditions that made such products possible.
Within this framework, physical reasoning can be situated as a foundational layer of thought formation that precedes conceptual cognition. Physical reasoning refers to the organization of experience through bodily and spatial conditions prior to symbolic interpretation. Rather than functioning as an explicit intellectual method, it operates as a set of pre-cognitive structural conditions. Through engagement with space, force, resistance, and flow, the body coordinates experience in ways that support the later emergence of conceptual thought.
These pre-conceptual conditions of thought can be further clarified through analogy with biological evolution. In evolutionary processes, functions do not appear as predefined goals but emerge through the gradual transformation of existing structures under environmental pressures. The formation of bilateral symmetry, early photoreceptive capacities, and the differentiation of the mouth and jaw indicate that perceptual and behavioral abilities did not arise suddenly as discrete functions. Rather, they developed as existing physical structures were repeatedly exposed to environmental constraints and began to perform new roles.
Over extended evolutionary timescales, such structural transformations accumulated and stabilized, creating the conditions for more complex forms of cognition to emerge. From this perspective, conceptual thought appears less as an original starting point than as a later outcome of material and sensory organizations that had reached sufficient coherence and density. Thought may thus be understood as a threshold phenomenon, becoming observable only once underlying structural conditions are consolidated.
A comparable structural logic can be observed in prehistoric human practices. Tools, animal imagery, ritual artifacts, and spatial arrangements suggest that early humans organized their world through bodily action and material manipulation prior to formal conceptual systems. Learning during this period occurred less through linguistic explanation than through repeated practices such as handling soil, regulating fire, breaking and assembling stone, and responding to material transformation.
This gradual accumulation can be understood more precisely through formative mechanisms observed in stellar formation. Prior to the emergence of a star, diffuse gas and dust are repeatedly drawn together, disturbed, and compressed under gravitational forces, becoming reorganized into a material state capable of sustaining stellar structure. At this stage, the system cannot yet be described as a star; however, within the material itself, physical configurations that enable structural stability are already being formed. This formative logic is structurally continuous with the evolutionary processes discussed earlier, rather than metaphorically analogous, and human thought may likewise be understood as the result of such physical reorganization accumulated through the biological body. Here, physical reasoning does not denote cognitive judgment or intentionality, but refers to the process by which structures become organized into self-sustaining forms through repeated physical interaction.
This framework also bears directly on theoretical and technical limitations encountered in contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. While current AI systems demonstrate strong performance with structured and externalized data such as text, images, and symbols, these achievements primarily reflect statistical learning over already conceptualized outputs. The relevance of physical reasoning becomes particularly evident when considering current limitations in artificial intelligence and embodied learning systems.
In this context, physical reasoning can be understood not as a specialized problem-solving technique but as a core theoretical concept for reconstructing the conditions under which thought becomes possible. Just as prehistoric humans and material practitioners such as sculptors develop understanding through sustained bodily engagement with matter, thought emerges through repeated coordination between body and world across time. Rather than replacing conceptual cognition, physical reasoning precedes and conditions it, providing a framework for explaining how cognition becomes possible in the first place.
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Videodrome and the Physical Interface of Thought
How the Body Becomes a Device, and How Clothing Extends Its Field
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) is often classified as a classic of body horror or media critique, but when viewed from another angle it reveals an entirely different stratum. What the film explores is not simply the grotesque spectacle of a body mutating, but the moment when thought penetrates the body and becomes material, and the process through which that material transformation reconstructs the body as a device. In the film, the protagonist’s body is directly rearranged by television signals, electronic images, and compressed flows of information. The crucial point is that these images do not symbolize or metaphorize bodily change. Rather, information itself leaves a material trace on the body. Video signals open the skin, reorganize tissue, and turn the living body into a physical interface through which external information gains direct entry.
At this point we are compelled to look at the body anew. The body is not a passive recipient of sensation. It is a medium in which the residues of thought accumulate, transform, and sediment over time, a physical laboratory of thought that has existed long before formal concepts emerged. Biology reflects this perspective to some extent. Octopuses, for example, process information through a nervous system distributed across their arms. This suggests that cognition does not necessarily occur only within a single central organ, but can arise through the integrated field of sensation, rhythm, and response that spans the entire body. Of course, octopuses and humans diverged extremely early in evolutionary history, and they share no relevant cognitive lineage. The point here is not evolutionary similarity but the structural possibility that cognition need not be centered in the brain alone. The fact that perception, response, and patterning can occur through an entire body in a completely different species structurally echoes how signals in Videodrome permeate the protagonist’s body to induce transformation. Both cases imply the same underlying fact. The entire body can become a physical device for thought.
Early humans also understood the world through the body long before language emerged. Pressing clay, shaping stone, carving wood, and touching materials were ways of experimenting with the world, and these acts were the starting point of thought. Such activities are not merely the origins of art. They are the process through which thought acquires density by encountering matter. Concepts formed only after bodily experience accumulated, and the body served as the first site where the physical traces of thought were stored.
This perspective becomes visible again in the history of dress. Clothing has never been merely a sculptural covering for the body. It has always been a structural device that redistributes the body’s conditions. Corsets redirect pressure. Panniers expand bodily width. Crinolines alter the rhythm and balance of movement. These devices physically reorganized human biomechanics and, in doing so, transformed sensation, behavior, and modes of social interaction. This mirrors the way information signals in Videodrome reconfigure the body. When the body's structure changes, sensation changes; when sensation changes, the conditions of thought and the way the world is perceived shift accordingly.
Within this flow, the philosophy of STARSICA MODULAR finds its position. If Videodrome asks how information reshapes the body, STARSICA MODULAR approaches the inverse question: how the body generates new forms of thought through devices. Thought gains density within the body. The body becomes an extended interface through clothing. And clothing becomes a device that redesigns the relationship between the body and the world. A device is not a mere tool but a structural act that rearranges the pathways linking body, thought, and world. Clothing is therefore a technological and cultural device, a physical interface that expands cognition.
Ultimately, Videodrome shows a body being reconstituted by information, but the phenomenon extends far beyond cinematic grotesquerie. The body altered by information becomes a model for how the world impresses itself upon us and how those impressions are reorganized. In this model, the body becomes a device where thought accumulates, and clothing becomes a technological extension that modifies this device.
This perspective moves across many fields at once: art, philosophy, physics, cognitive science, dress history, and engineering. The body is the laboratory of thought. Clothing is the extension of that laboratory. And devices create new conditions under which the structure of the world can be reconfigured. In this structure, the device-oriented approach of STARSICA MODULAR is not simply a formal innovation. It is a physical inquiry into how the pathways linking body, thought, and world can be rearranged.
If Videodrome asks how information transforms the body, STARSICA MODULAR continues with the question of how the body produces new forms of thought through devices. These two trajectories meet at a single structural truth. Thought begins in the body, the body extends through devices, and devices in turn reshape the conditions of thought.
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The Creative Journey Begun on Architectural Drafting Paper
From Drawing to Space: How Structural Thought Unfolds into New Possibilities
Iannis Xenakis conceived music not as intuitive expression but as the deliberate design of invisible structures. His creative process began on architectural drafting paper, where lines, vectors, and probabilistic curves operated as codes that concealed structural behaviors. These marks were not aesthetic sketches but compressed instructions for how form might unfold in a higher dimension. In this sense, drawing functioned as an engineering language. When expanded into sound, the coded patterns on the 2D surface revealed densities, movements, and tensions that could not be fully perceived at the moment of inscription. The structural clarity and originality embedded in his early work remain significant precisely because they demonstrate how a simple plane can contain the blueprint of an entire spatial world.
Xenakis positioned music at the intersection of architecture, mathematics, and temporal construction. Working before computational tools were widely accessible, he relied on manual calculation and architectural reasoning to produce complex sonic systems. His compositions, often described as dissonant or non-melodic, were in fact structural models comparable to early computer specifications. They encoded operations that exceeded the limits of the available technology. The constraints of his era prevented the full realization of the dimensional worlds embedded in his diagrams, suggesting that modern computation would have revealed the deeper logic already latent in his drawn patterns.
The UPIC system exemplifies this intimate relationship between drawing and emergence. As an early graphical sound synthesis interface, UPIC translated drawn forms into audible structures, allowing mathematical behavior, gesture, and sound to coexist as one process. Its logic anticipates contemporary digital environments in which algorithms and visual representation jointly shape creative outcomes. Within this system, drawing is no longer a representation of sound but the condition through which sound becomes possible. A line contains movement; a curve contains tension; a pattern contains an entire spatial logic waiting to unfold.
It is at this juncture, where drawing becomes structure and structure seeks a larger spatial field, that the next phase of Xenakis’s work emerges. The concepts encoded on drafting paper expanded naturally into architecture, not as a shift between disciplines but as the unfolding of the same structural code into a different dimension. The continuity of his work makes it clear that music and architecture were parallel articulations of a single underlying pattern language.
His composition Metastaseis became the conceptual basis for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Expo. In his collaboration with Le Corbusier, Xenakis transformed temporal graphs into spatial curves, and arches, parabolas, and hyperbolas became the physical geometry of the pavilion’s roof. Music became space, and space was read like a musical score. This process revealed how a 2D code, once translated into 3D, acquires thickness, mass, and experiential depth. The texture of sound and the tension of architectural form synchronized under a shared mathematical structure, making the pavilion a rare moment in which code, sound, and architecture converged into a unified work.
Rather than focusing on traditional rhythm or harmony, Xenakis constructed masses of sound governed by probability, algebra, and the physics of time. This structural method extended naturally into his architectural ideas. The cyclical translation between mathematics, music, and space was not a fusion of fields but an inquiry into how a single structural logic can emerge differently when expressed through different materials, dimensions, or senses.
This perspective illuminates the deeper meaning of his work. The significance lies not in reproducing a past legacy but in demonstrating that a code written on a flat surface can generate an infinite range of spatial and temporal realities. The Philips Pavilion offered audiences an experience that dissolved the boundaries between art, science, and philosophy, creating a contemporary myth rooted in structural recurrence. Through this work, Xenakis revealed that creative practice is fundamentally the act of constructing conditions in which hidden structures can emerge. In doing so, he forged a symbolic link between past and future, showing that every drawing, algorithm, or pattern carries the potential to unfold new worlds the moment it encounters material, dimension, and time.
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In this sense, formwork can be applied as an operational framework that enables multiple experiments to be synchronized.In this sense, formwork can be applied as an operational framework that enables multiple experiments to be synchronized.