How does one dress for the post-apocalyptic landscape? Mary Mattingly can show you how.


(Mary Mattingly, Wearable Tent, 2006. 40" x 40" C-print.)

Some specifics: “The fabric used is an outerlayer combination of Kaiok, a phase change material like Outlast® Adaptive Comfort®, waterproof Cordura, Solarweave UV protectant fabric, and the inner muslin layer. The fabric has the ability to keep the body at a comfortable temperature no matter the weather. The encapsulated warmers (like those found in electric blankets) are also woven into the innermost layer of the home, and through sensors, are adjusted to your bodies temperature and keep the home warm or cool on the inside to counteract the outside. The electronic silver threads in the fabric connecting to the sensors will give the wearers the ability to monitor themselves, their health and introspectively study themselves, as well as monitor the outdoor conditions, and transmit information to another, currently through a ZigBee connection or secure nodal random key coding and patterning frequency that can be set up to directly interface with another person’s home and information. This infrastructure will be able to receive signals from satellite and aid in GPS, mapping VA goggles, cel-sat and Internet.”

So that you can still blog in a ruined landscape? Brilliant!


(Marry Mattingly, Always On, 2005. 28" x 20" Chromogenic Dye-Coupler Print.)

Always on, indeed.


(Mary Mattingly, Possibilities of Multilateral Communication, 2005. 30" x 30" Chromogenic Dye-Coupler Print.)

Mary Mattingly gets even more specific about these new global uniforms. In fact, she imagines an array of future ecologies where a society of wanderers are forced to be self-sufficient, and various scenarios in which the body is networked to the landscape in surprisingly intimate ways.

Moreover, the view from your backyard will always be spectacular.


(Mary Mattingly, View From My Backyard, 2006. 40" x 40" C-print.)


(Mary Mattingly, Working With Water, 2006. 40" x 40" C-print.)

Finally, this last image is titled Soldier, so I wonder if Mattingly also designed a wearable millitary-industrial-entertainment complex.


(Mary Mattingly, Soldier, 2006. 30" x 30" C-print.)

Which also leads me to wonder how this nomadic complex will inscribe itself onto the landscape. Through paradimensional songlines, hollowed out craters stringed together by an intercontinental Silk Road, or Out-of-Africa-like bifurcations?

Future cultural geographers will certainly have much to investigate.

(Spotted at Eating Bark.)