Concept
Stained Underwear is a kinetic sculpture that sheds light on the stigmatized and under-discussed topic of period care.
Real-time period data - the time and effort Pepi spent on period care each day during their fifteen day long period - is visualized by a robot arm scrubbing their period-stained underwear.
By bringing period data from behind closed doors into public spaces, we want to reclaim the power of the body, flesh, and blood against the existing patriarchal structures of Period Tax, and the lack of free access to menstrual products.
Real-time period data - the time and effort Pepi spent on period care each day during their fifteen day long period - is visualized by a robot arm scrubbing their period-stained underwear.
By bringing period data from behind closed doors into public spaces, we want to reclaim the power of the body, flesh, and blood against the existing patriarchal structures of Period Tax, and the lack of free access to menstrual products.
Iterations
You are currently looking at Version 2 of Stained Underwear, which was specifically designed for the UVA Data Is Art competition. Explore the original prototype Version 1 below.
The Data
Stained Underwear uses Pepi's real-time period data: the number of times, and the dates on which they scrubbed their period stained underwear during a 15-day long period. You can find the original data on Github.
Data Is Art Award
Version Two of Stained Underwear received the Grand Prize in the 2024 Data Is Art Awarhosted by the University of Virginia. Stained Underwear is exhibited in the new data science building at UVA from April to December 2024.
Making-Of
Art is for sharing! All building instructions, circuit diagrams, code, and 3D models can be found on our Github. Please reach out if you have any questions or suggestions on how to further improve the project.
... first prototype of the robotic arm
... crafting the wooden base in our wood shop
... screwing down the electronics to the wooden box
... packing up the project for shipping to UVA
Special Thanks To
Pepi Ng for being the best collaborator! The Data Is Art Award co-chairs, especially Emma Candelier and Alex Gates from the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. The awesome Data Is Art projects from Steve Haske, Peter Cybriwsky, Hoan Nguyen, Ryan Gross, Chloe Hudson Prock, Milán Janosov. Gloria Duan and Morgan Mueller for putting up with out V1 ugly prototype.