The first artist I want to address is Caroline Woolard. Based in Brooklyn, she focuses as a post-media artist. Woolard's work is often represented in the form of sculptures, websites, and workshops, usually all collaborative forms they explore civic engagement and communitarianism. Woolard's work explores the space between people and architecture, subverting domestic objects such as lights, chairs, clothes etc. to cultivate everyday magic. Woolard is also a co-founder of OurGoods.org and Trade School, two barter economies for cultural producers. She is also a coordinating member of an organization that promotes grassroots economic justice, SolidarityNYC. The OurGoods model is structured for self-service, tailored trades in which the users can navigate between two columns labeled “We have” and “We need,” and are able to search for objects, skills, and spaces. Her hard work in OurGoods.org and Trade School focuses more on the value of what one has and what one wants as well as the value of both of these things and what can be done with it. Woolard has her project, Work Dress, a hybrid between an apron and a dress, that she offers up for barter only. “I’ve traded my work dress for my personal website, for a photo shoot, fencing gear, laundry access, research assistance, and designer bike attachments,” says co-founder Caroline Woolard, “Barter asks both parties to talk about value.” One of the main focuses with OurGoods is that the "needs" are contextualised into "projects" to help people better understand why they need the things they need and to help keep it's focus on the community aspect. In an interview with Ben Valentine from hyperallergic.com Caroline Woolard expresses why they started OurGoods. She explains a point of few that not many people are used to thinking in, the economy is bad meaning you may not have a lot of money but that doesn't mean you don't have a lot of skills or ideas that can be used in benefits of yourself and others. Bartering is a great way to exchange your ideas, skills and resources with a creative community to be a part of creating new projects possible. The problem that I have encountered with choosing Caroling Woolard as my researched artist is that her part in this collaborative work can be looked at in so many different ways.
She has done a lot of work with art in public that is meant for public participation which I find to be very interesting but also hard to talk about with concrete answers. Mainly because art has no answers but only questions, we are a field of study that seeks to be diverse and think differently as well as together in projects such as the OurGoods site and Trade School. This idea of art being only questions leads me to think of research in the field as subjective and opinion based as much as it can be about the artists thoughts behind the work. The work I have chosen as my focus is Work Dress and through my research, focusing directly on the work, I have discovered it's purpose is mainly functional and as the pilot project for the OurGoods overall project. The piece itself is not about itself, which makes it hard to find answers to the questions I have for it. I emailed Caroline Woolard and she did get back to me but with her very busy schedule was unable to answer my questions so I must come up with my own take on the Work Dress. Coming from a feminist perspective, as I tend to do with almost everything, this project can say a number of different things. One of those things would be taking it as a bash towards women in work, throughout history in American culture, as well as majority of others, women have been seen as the caring mother, the supporter to the man/husband, the one who cooks, cleans, organizes, and etc. Woolard takes a piece of gendered clothing, the dress, and transforms it into a supporter of the idea of women being in the home performing such tasks as I previously described because it is now a utility garment. Another way of looking at the Work Dress can also be seen by feminists in the way of empowerment and embracing of femininity because it is a dress. The dress garment and other female gender labeled clothes are often embraced because some women believe that they are embracing their figures which in turn to them is seen as their femininity. 
Speaking of femininity in clothing I'd like to move onto my other chosen artist, Diana Eng. She went to school at RISD for apparel design, she began her career as a designer on Bravo's Project Runway, Season 2. Eng is a fashion designer who specializes her work in technology, math, and science. She found her comfortable place in Victoria's Secret research and development department. She is the author of Fashion Geek: Clothes, Accessories, Tech. Her work has been featured in exhibits both in the U.S. and internationally around the globe. When 2009 came around Eng received a grant from Rhizome and an artist residency from Eyebeam Art and Technology Center to create fashion prototypes using laser cutters, 3D printers, and electronics for her educational online program FairytaleFashion.org. In 2010 she started her ready-to-wear line named after herself, Diana Eng. She continues to bring new knowledge and techniques to the fashion market. One of her projects that I personally find amusing as well as smart is her Jack Frost Scarf. I've included a video showing how the Jack Frost Scarf works. The colder the scarf gets the bigger the snowflakes become. This scarf reminded me of the color changing shirts I had when I was younger.The longer you stay in the sun the bolder the colors become. This scarf is basically the opposite of that, she takes technology and puts it into clothing on a different way then we are used to seeing in the recent years which makes sense in the fashion world because it seems that fashion trends like history tend to repeat themselves in a bit of a twist. The Jack Frost Scarf is not the only scarf that Eng has created though, she also has a Fibonacci Scarf. This particular scarf is knit with the Fibonacci number pattern which is famous in the mathematics world. It is created by adding a number to the previous number. For example: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...(2 comes from adding 1+1, 3 comes from adding 2+1). One of the unique things about this number pattern that is important to Eng's style is that the Fibonacci number patterns are found in nature in the seed placement of a sunflower, the pattern on a pine cone, and in the uncurling found in ferns. Biomimetics is reflected in this scarf because it is taking methods of engineering found in nature and taking it to human situations, the Fibonacci number pattern creates a golden spiral that is used in financial predictions and in computer algorithms. The scarf is knit with the Fibonacci numbers in order: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21. As the scarf is knit, the new number of stitches is added to the previous number of stitches to get the next number of stitches. Which make the knitting method influenced by the Fibonacci formula.
This scarf's appearance is elegant and airy, it also seems as though it would take weeks to knit, but not the case for Diana Eng. She spent three years to perfect the Fibonacci pattern which ended up taking her to the Textile Design Lab in New Zealand to see if pattern could be manufactured by a special sewing machine. The people at TDL were able to program her design into their computer and print it. It was as easy as printing a paper at home once it was all programed into the machine, a whole garment was essentially printed out of the machine fully completed. One of the special things about when you create a program for a knit garment is that you can copy and paste sections of the code from another garment. So for example you can add a sleeve or a pocket from another work onto the previous garment. Also the program is very interesting because you can have just about an infinite number of variations in code and the artist can look at individual stitches and make corrections accordingly to the design or intention. In my presentation I presented Diana Eng's work as her collaborative/crowdsourcing type of educational program FairytaleFashion, but after actually writing this all I have discovered that I needed to focus more on just a collection of her work, that is why I have chosen to talk about the mini scarf collection. Both are innovative garments with math and technology foundations that are not commonly seen in fashion, I feel that because of this background her scarves have it puts a whole other level to her fashion other than it's aesthetics. Comparing the Work Dress and the mini scarf collection I will use a feminist perspective. The Fibonacci Scarf is beautiful as well as smart, certain women today argue that being knowledgeable is nothing without also possessing beauty. So in a way this scarf is an answer to that way of thinking. With fashion trends mainly focusing on aesthetics the scarfs are a breath of fresh air because their is a story to their aesthetics. Going back to the Work Dress, the piece makes for smart clothing in a more functional way. Eng's scarf's are beautiful and Woolard's dress is functional. Both artists are using their art in a crowd sourcing method, Woolard's dress is barter only, Eng's FairytailFashion is about the viewers input and possibilities in trading fashion education. When doing my research and choosing artists I am surprised at my results, in no way am I entirely interested in fashion but these two artists gave me a whole new perspective and also a new respect for what goes behind clothing aesthetics. Sources of Research:
http://eyebeam.org/people/current
http://hyperallergic.com/48115/aconversationwith-caroline-woolard/
http://www.good.is/post/ourgoods-new-york-s-new-barter-network/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/jan/20/interview-with-caroline-woolard-of-ourgoods/
http://www.dianaeng.com/blog/
http://www.dianaeng.com/shop/fibonacci-scarf/
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