Luminous retro Cyberpunk costume

In the Boing Boing Flickr pool, Melissa Li shares some wonderful photo documentation of a cool costume she developed in multiple editions, over a period of years. Above, "Cyberpunk 2.0," the 2012 build:

Costume is an original design inspired by the 'cyberpunk'/fantasy genre work of artists including Masumune Shirow, Eric Canete, Joe Benitez, and various modern gaming concept art. The process was a lot of fun and took approximately 3 months of on-and-off planning and building. The assembly is made from over 60 parts designed in Solidworks and sewn/cut/glued/laser-cut/heat-formed using various techniques.
The costume includes color changing LEDs on the spine and front that are controlled by an Arduino microcontroller and onboard RGB controllers (respectively), and is powered by 16 AA batteries, 1 LiPo rechargeable battery, two 2032 coin cells, and one 9-volt battery. In total there's more than 70 LED's on the entire costume and over 60 parts.

And below, the 1.0 version she created for DragonCon 2011:

Design was based on actual spinal transverse sections and lit with ~40 LED's. Design and assembly of smaller accessory pieces for shoulders, chest, and arm were found pieces or designed in Solidworks. In total, ~46 pieces put together over a period of ~2 months.

Photo by Anna Fisher

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Lobster

No, guys, it’s cool, her butt’s a heatsink.
- Preston Sturges
  
  Cheeky!
DewiMorgan

Cyberpunk is RETRO now? :(
- http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
  
  the 90′s were 20 years ago
  
  :’(
  - Ashen Victor
    
    20 years? What do you mean…
    /looks at calendar
    Woha… WOHA!
  - donovan acree
    
    Cyberpunk is from the early 80′s….
    - Gilbert Wham
      
      Nonononononono, that’s got to be wrong. If it were true, I’d be, like, old and shit. That’s not right, not right at all…
    - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
      
      I went for the era of mass popularity vs time of origin. And her costume seems more cybergoff glowy raver to me than nu-noir blade runner.
      
      Plus 30 years is even more depressing.
http://www.legrandbazart.com sigismund

You mean, postmodern-futuristic-steampunk ?
newhavenstumpjumper

1st picture definitely needs some cable bundling. entanglement hazard.
- Preston Sturges
  
  Gaffer tape would have spoied the look.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  Yeah lets buy that girl some fluro cable ties.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  Heck, let’s just have a multicolored ribbon cable.
http://fallsastar.com Crashproof

Cool, but not really what I think of when I think of cyberpunk.
- ldobe
  
  My personal idea of cyberpunk is that it has less to do with what is worn on you than what’s implanted *in* you.
Argento Dei

Holy cow, that’s a cobbled together nightmare of an electrical system. I would like to help streamline that collection of batteries down to a a couple of lipos, and remove the e-waste that this thing is responsible for.
sata blank

Here’s a company that offers club gear that’s kinda similar in style. https://www.facebook.com/electriccandycouture