The creation of truly wearable art really is an iterative process. Last year I had a short list of takeaways from the original Anthrolume 1.0 experience, the most important of which were:
- Make the next suit “hug-friendly.”
- It’s cold in the high desert at night! Design the suit for cold weather.
- Design for cable stresses.
- Get as many chargers as you have batteries.

Anthrolume in action
The good news is that on most fronts, Anthrolume 2.0 really was a spectactularly more successful piece than the 1.0 suit. All of the above except (3) were well addressed. The new suit was hug-friendly and I was glad for that – I can’t count how many serious bear-hugs I got. The overalls were warm because I could wear whatever I wanted underneath. And I had 12 batteries and 12 chargers – parallel charging is great!
Cable stresses, however, did continue to dog me this year. In fact, it was worse than last year. So the revised lesson is: if you’re going to create wearable art, wear it! The reason I didn’t discover my cable stress points was because the suit spent a lot of time hanging from a microphone stand on a hanger, instead of on my body. Lesson learned.
I ended up field-replacing four LEDs while I was at the Burn. But after that, the suit worked like a champ, including the abuse I put it through getting up onto the scaffolding at the 2:00 rave and two hours of straight dancing that night.
Also the 12 batteries performed well – 6-7 hours of continuous animation playback. Of course I wished for more – next year I’ll bring extra batteries.
I also learned more about which animations work and which don’t. Since my suit is really just an animation-playback platform, I’ll take that wisdom forward to improve how the suit looks in the future.
Other random observations:
- CoolNeon LEDs are mostly playa proof.
- Having pockets in the suit was great. I had to add special wiring extensions for that, and boy am I glad I did.
- The cut-washer method of attaching the LEDs worked great – not a single washer came off the entire Burn.
I’m still working on Animaker. More to report soon.