For Halloween of '99, I went to Castro St. in San Francisco, where 300,000 people donned fantastic constumes and partied all night under the watchful eye of police testing their Y2K equioment. My costume, which I'd originally envisioned as a rave outfit, represented the union of linear and circular, logical and creative, western and eastern, and it glowed like hell under black lights. In fact, all the paint used was glow-in-the-dark, and after being charged by blacklights would continue to glow. I started with a dancers bodysuit as a base, and hand-painted it, which took about 10 hours of work. I added a strange silver mask, blue fingernail polish, and blue hair for the complete freak look.
The front of the costume was boring wireframe - straight lines. The mask is abstract and inhuman, since I am trying to be a generic concept, not a person.
The back has braided knotwork forming a yin-yang. The mirror reflects the mask for the camera and the camera's LCD screen for me.
This fuzzy pictures shows my fingernail polish and the linkages between front and back.
as does this one.
Here the entire back can be seen on the floor (plus my little toesies as I stand on the toilet to get enough height for the picture). This is the only picture which shows the knotwork on the legs: two trefoil knots and several simple twists.
Last Modified: 2/2000
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com