Dance and Movement as Drivers for Sustainable E-Textile Innovation

My research identifies artists' contribution to arts-sciences and art-tech collaboration, beyond aesthetics. It addresses both the process whereby artists and engineers collaborate and the collaborative outcomes themselves. Specifically, I build upon my work in dance and in luminous textiles where I look at not only the interactions among choreographers, dancers, and engineers, but also the possibilities at large created by textile-based, low-emission lights.

My investigations examine:

• The working space: how a fab lab set up next to the dance studio can help inter-disciplinary collaboration.
• Dance and movement as manipulation tools that help user-centric innovation.
• The artist perspective and vision as a practice that inspires sustainable innovation.
• The possibilities of textile-based low-intensity lights for new lighting uses.

Both an artist and a sustainability specialist, Jeanne Bloch works at the intersection of art, technological experimentation and business innovation. Jeanne worked over 15 years as a sustainability advisor to international organizations and global companies on issues such as fair trade, child labor, community empowerment, sustainable consumption, global warming and sustainable innovation. She has been awarded an artist's residencies at 104 Paris and Dance-Tech Berlin, was an invited artist at Imagine 2020 (Art and Climate Change), and presented at Ecological Experimentation in Dance Performance Workshop, Théatre de la Ville, Paris, among others. Today, she brings together both of her passions by questioning how we use light in the context of climate change and using dance and movement experimentation to create new lighting aesthetics through the development of luminous fabrics, wearable tech and lighting objects. Jeanne is based in Paris. She has worked in South Korea, Congo-Brazzaville, El Salvador, USA, Israel, and numerous European countries.