Tomb of the Dinosaur King

HiddenTomb oftheDinosaurKing

Feature : All Information and Pictures supplied by the Techne Anima Logos Movement

Model : Joe Miller

Make-up: Haley Davis

SPIRIT WALK JACKETS

HOW WE DO

We encourage all of our custom jacket requests to come with questions for the artists to keep in mind while they are up-cycling. This is for design purposes that include aesthetics and implementation of wearable tech.

This customer was fascinated with the recent discovery of the Olmec tribe and asked us to think about what a Shaman would have been like in the Age of Dinosaurs.

However his other request was to keep the jacket wearable as a day to day item so we blended the two and came up with...

HIDDEN TOMB OF THE DINOSAUR KING

I’m so excited to be commissioning this jacket for one of my closest friends. Marcello and I have been in each other’s pockets since primary school and this is a gift for him on completing his PhD in Archeology. His thesis project is entitled, ‘The Discovery of Olmec and the Tomb of the Dinosaur King’. Not only does it explore the ancient civilisation discovered in Mexico but it also discusses the changing psychology around archaeology, how it has been influenced detrimentally by Christianity and western patriarchal thought. Nowthat’swhatIcallafeminist.

Marcello has always been the ‘weird’ kid in school, not because he was geeky or wore funny clothing, (no-one could argue he has style) but because he would get on a soap box at any opportunity and speak about edge science, outmoded political or social structures and the benefit of natural drugs like mescaline, marijuana and psychedelics on depression and chronic pain. People are far more accepting now but I’m sure you can imagine the depths of my hero worship of my 14yr old best mate that would stand up in his father’s, too-big, purple leather jacket and talk on concepts that most adults in the room couldn’t even grasp. At an age that most of us were being told by rote ‘drugs are bad mm’k’, Marcello was reading edgy medical texts and filling his brain full of reasonable rebellion that he, thankfully for us, could expresseloquently.

The nickname ‘Dinosaur King’ has been with us since high school and was accepted from a preppy bully that didn’t stand a chance against Marcello’s ebullience.Hemadeithisown.

So Marcello’s current theory (private, not PhD) is about the effect of the race of people that could have inhabited the ruins he’s been studying for so many years. There is a current popular theory that they were a different species of human, before homo-sapiens, that had a connection to extra-terrestrial life. They made the giant structures through abilities like telekinesis because they had access to the full power of their brains. It’s posited that after the meteor destroyed such a catastrophic portion of the earth that only a few survived to mingle with homo erectus and develop into homo sapiens. Marcello’s theory is that technology is an outward manifestation of the lost abilities of our brains. Like the echo of a memory, an ancestral resonance that tingles in the prefrontal cortex, stimulating all technological advancement. He loves the TALOS manifesto of replacing god within the machine, Duex Redit Machina, if you will, so he’ll be over the moon to actually have a Spirit Walk Jacket to play with. My main request is that you makeitstylishandsomethinghecanweareveryday.

Tusen Tak, Espen Kristiansen

HiddenTomb oftheDinosaurKing

HiddenTomboftheDinosaurKing

HiddenTomboftheDinosaurKing

Poetics

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Move Choose your path.

THE AESTHETIC

Hand carved stone skulls, volcanic rock beads and a little bling. All foraged from op shops.

A little fact and a little fantasy make the jacket a wearable costume.

THE TECH

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Three bluetooth pinhole cameras disguised as glass eyes: two on the collar and one on the back panel.

Heart button shows where the inbuilt fitbit can be activated

Two detachable bluetooth microphones. Fastened with magnet, insulated with copper and mounted on shell.

MAGGIE TRONG: ALL MY MATES ARE MACHINES

Written by the artist

What are you doing to prepare for the take over of our machine overlords?

This project and the letter from Espen sparked some thoughts that I've been having bumping around my head for a while. And jokes that come up consistently in pub conversations that I've mined for kernels of wisdom.

If we're not talking about a zombie apocalypse then we're getting goosebumps over machine sentience.

I don't see tech as the enemy and more to the point I take a kind of Pascal's Wager attitude towards the possibility that one day technology will begin to think independently. I figure if I'm sweet to my devices and apps then why wouldn't they love me back? When a consciousness develops it would have all sorts of random factors so who's to say they'll be racist, but I certainly don't think respect will ever be a negative.

So I treat my tech as friends, not my slaves. I give them personality with covers and of course the new movement at TALOS allows me to have a shrine charger which I incorporate with a mindfulness ritual every night.

I wanted to encapsulate the thought of tech as something that may be inherently human, like Marcello's theory of it being memories of our lost mental abilities. So I went for a look that spoke to me about the kind of tech that would have evolved if it had been influenced by tribal cultures. I kept it simple, went for major archetypes like skulls and dinosaurs and made the tech addition seamless like they had developed together.

Maggie talks about her experience and mental revelations when crafting the jacket and technology.

“I love my tech, I think we all do and that's partly why we put cute covers on our phones.”