In the field of wearable technology, or wearable media, artist Soomi Park is a veteran who has been speculating on its possibilities since the mid-noughties.
Perhaps best known for her LED Eyelash and Digital Veil projects — the former took small LED lights that flickered on or off according to the movement of the wearer’s head, and attached them to false eyelashes; the latter placed an LCD panel in front of the wearer’s face to offer alternative facial distortion — Park regularly questions beauty standards, especially those prevalent in her native Korea.While social critique — specifically, the desire for big eyes as a beauty norm or the frequency of plastic surgery in the afore-mentioned examples — is an important part of her practice, the playfulness of the work makes it operate on multiple levels. Brimming with technological ingenuity, she’s also revealing an alluring futurism with prototype products that could have come straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel. As she nears completion of her PhD studies in Media Arts Technology, it’s apparent that these innovations are merely the beginning.
