Atari Women Suit – Carina Dempsey Portfolio

Atari Women Suit.

E-textile Piece.

Atari Women Suit.

DURATION

January - March 2019

MY ROLE

Physical Computing

Summary

The Atari Women Suit is an e-textile piece designed to tell the stories of female engineers from Atari in the 1970s and 1980s. The piece is a part of an interactive exhibit put together by the Atari Women research group. It was featured at Emerald City Comic Con, the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, and Hyponotica, an e-textile fashion show for digital media artists, in 2019.

My teammates for this project included Melody Xu and Kellie Dunn.

The Opportunity

Atari Women is a research group at the University of Washington centered around collecting stories about the women who were part of the early days of Atari gaming and engineering. The group is organized between the the Human Centred Computing Department at University of Copenhagen, and the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at University of Washington.

We spent 10 weeks creating an interactive exhibit to tell the story of these women, hoping to:

Bring their stories and work to light
Prevent the spread of misinformation about them
Connect their stories back to the modern narrative of women in gaming and computer science

Our Vision

Our goal for this piece was to create an e-textile piece to draw attention to our exhibit, and help tell the stories of the Atari Women. Our collaborative vision was a one piece jumpsuit, with the rainbow Atari logo built into the front, featuring eight lantern-like 8-bit inspired cubes at the shoulder level. The cubes each reference the story of a different Atari Woman, with a graphic featured from a game which they designed on them, and light up.

We chose the coveralls style because it references work-wear without narrowly existing in feminine stereotypes, and it’s an easy base with which to conceal the infrastructure of the piece.

Here is one of my early sketches of the suit.

Here is an early sketch by my teammate, Kellie Dunn.

Materials Checklist

For the project we ended up gathering our materials from several sources. We checked out the Adafruit Website, local craftstores, and even Makerspaces at the University of Washington.

These parts included but were not limited to:

24 Flora RGB Smart NeoPixels

Plastic rods for cubes, 3/16" dia.

FLORA: Wearable electronic platform

25 Super Bright White 5mm LED

LilyPad Arduino

Conductive thread and wire

Black coveralls

Atari Logo Process

I put most of my work in this project in creating the Atari Logo for our suit. We created the logo by using AdaFruit NeoPixels, and connecting them with wires and our Flora.

NeoPixel Code
The code we used was different scraps of the demo code available on the Ada Fruit website, as we wanted the light patterns of our logo to become rainbow, and red, the main color used in our Atari Women brand. However, I was able to learn about the different functions when changing It is available online here.

Conductive Thread
We had to stitch three different lines of conductive thread through the fabric of each stripe of the Atari Logo in order for the NeoPixels to light up. We sewed one strand to connect power, one to connect ground, and one to connect the input sensors for the code.

Glitches and Resistance
After we tried using the conductive thread twice, we discovered that the thread we were using was splitting into pieces. This was causing resistance in our current, which was preventing our NeoPixels from lighting up and causing our code to glitch up.

Copper Wire
After our second try with the conductive thread, my partner tried linking the lights with wire, and we almost immediately found success. We connected the wires together by stripping them of their protective top layer, and twisting the underlying layers to the NeoPixels. Afterwards, the wires were soldered to the NeoPixels.

8 Bit Cubes and Coveralls

Our fantastic costume designer, Kellie, made alterations on the coveralls we bought, and focused her attention on building the 8 bit cubes. She 3D printed the edges of the cubes and connected the plastic rods together to form cubes. These cubes were stitched together on a costume piece that would be placed over the coveralls.

Here the wires connecting the cube lights are all exposed!

Kellie posing with one of her eight bit cubes the first time she lit it up.

Whoa! Check out all that code and wires.

The Final Suit

It took the entire ten weeks to create our final piece, we ended up finishing two days before our Comic Con Panel. Out of all of the projects I completed in my undergraduate career, I think I was the one I was most proud of finishing. It was my first time creating an e-textile piece, and my team had a lot to learn along the way, but we were able to create a suit that was very close to our original design.

I still remember the moment we got the Atari logo working, which was the last component that we finished. It’s safe to say that we were all extremely close to tears.

Sara Lucero, model @ Hypnotica, e-textile fashion show presented by fellow designers from the University of Washington.

Me @ Emerald City Comic Con with an Atari arcade style Centipede game.

Melody Xu, @ Emerald City Comic Con.

When All is Said and Done

If we had more time to work on this project, I would have wanted to focus on making the suits more interactive. Although we initially wanted the Atari logo or the LED cubes to be controlled using a remote, we had lots of trouble with IR sensor and connecting it with the Neo Pixels.

Me @ a University of Washington makerspace after we got the suit working for the first time.

Emerald City Comic Con and Beyond

Taking this suit to Emerald City Comic Con was a dream. I had the pleasure of wearing it for most of the day, and talking to Atari fans about their experiences with the games and knowledge of female engineers from the company. The suit gaged a lot of interest in the panel and helped us share our stories, which was ultimately our goal for the day. Our panel of female Atari engineers was a success.

If you want to learn more about our research or just want to play our awesome remixed version of Pac Man, you can visit our website here. Also, be sure to check out our article on GeekWire.