'Invisible Threads:' Second Life Sweatshop Becomes Sundance Sensation

Great example of how the interactive world is becoming more and more part of the real.

Posted on Generation WOW -January 28, 2008
At this year's Sundance Film Festival, the schwag comes with a virtual world twist.

A clothing sweatshop called "Invisible Threads" is making its debut at Sundance, and may soon help redefine "customized manufacturing" throughout the real, and not-so-real worlds.

At its most essential, Invisible Threads is a virtual sweatshop within Second Life where you can order real-world, "Doable Happiness" jeans designed specifically for you.

According to today's New York Times, IT is the brainchild of Stephanie Rothenberg, a new media performance artist, and Jeff Crouse, a digital artist and programmer.

Here's how it all works: Customers tell the "Invisible Threads" staff the size and style of jeans they would like; the instructions are sent to a virtual factory inside Second Life, where workers - paid in Linden dollars - push buttons that generate an image of the jean.

That image is sent to an industrial printer made by HP, which spits out the custom-printed canvas cotton patterns.

The patterns are then cut and assembled at the Sundance Festival with a glue gun with a little stitching for for reinforcement - all for about $35 - a huge markup from the 90 Linden (or about 90-cents) paid to Second Life workers.

You can see a basic framework for the solution in the video above.

Crouse and Rothenberg consider the whole initiative art. But as Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer for the Sundance Festival tells the Times, "It's called art now, but in the future it's going to be how you get your jeans. It will be daily life. So often what you call art is just people who see the future before the rest of us do."

Indeed, Crouse and Rothenberg are hardly the first to sew what they term "telemetric manufacturing" into the Web's DNA. Companies like InterActive Custom Clothes, Squash-Blossom and even Levi Strauss have been doing the same thing for over a decade.

Still, the Second Life connection is an post-modern twist.

Can matching pairs of virtual jeans, custom made for your avatar, be far behind?

Read more about it, here.