Blastosphere: Digital Art Becomes 3D Fashion' opens today with three new NewHive commissions from Alexandra Gorczynski, Miles Peyton, and Tara Sinn.
Sep 3 2015, 9:35am
Alexandra Gorczynski's design for Blastosphere. All images courtesy the artists and NewHive
Starting today, The Gallery at Ace Hotel New York hosts Blastosphere: Digital Art Becomes 3D Fashion, a month-long show that marries fashion with cutting-edge digital art. First showcased through the DIY art self-publishing platform NewHive, Alexandra Gorczynski, Miles Peyton, and Tara Sinn's commissioned works bridge IRL and URL by being rendered onto fabrics that have been encoded with REIFY's augmented reality technology.
“This was a unique opportunity to showcase the artworks offline in a way that held true to the original composition. I named the exhibition Blastospherebecause this process made us think about the incredible mutability of digital art,” Lindsay Howard, curator and director of the online commissioning program at NewHive, tells The Creators Project. "Once you create a digital file, it can be a work in itself or a starting point for any number of creative iterations,” she adds.
Tara Sinn
While traditional notions of fashion exist at the core of each artist's creative processes already, this project offers viewers the chance to discover a series of Print All Over Me-produced, internet art-housing wearables that conceptually reduce—or at least create the illusion of reducing—the distance between reality and virtuality.
Merging different approaches and aesthetics, Blastosphere showcases stunning artworks-to-wear, each an amalgam of printed patterns: Gorczynski's oscillate between art historical, organic and digital, Peyton crafts a participative hive body, and Sinn's is an RGB-powered landscape filled with beach ball gradients.
Miles Peyton
Underlying the show's main theme and augmented-reality related acrobatics, Blastosphere demonstrates the features and specificities possible with NewHive's well-curated roster. “I chose these particular artists and works because they represent some of the best uses of the NewHive platform, and take advantage of all of its multimedia capabilities,” Howard explains. “Alexandra Gorczynski and Tara Sinn both have strong visual aesthetics that translated perfectly to the garments, and Miles Peyton's work was able to come full circle conceptually—with the parts he'd accumulated online returning to the human form,” she concludes.
The three garments are available for purchase online here, here, and here. Meanwhile, you can stop by the Ace Hotel New York tonight to try them on at the Blastosphere opening, and at the New Museum Store on Sunday, September 13.
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Published: 10/02/2016 | Views: 7,603 |
A P P A R E L – Clothing in the age of data accumulation and machine learning
written by Greg J. Smith
The culmination of more than a year of research and development, A P P A R E L is an experimental fashion prototype by the Paris-based ‘anticipatory’ design studio N O R M A L S. Imagined for a fictional neighbourhood called Trudent where – thanks to the wonders of widespread automation – “above all things, residents care about their clothes,” garments have reverted to simple functional form (i.e. T-shirts) and ‘style’ is displayed via animated data-derived mesh geometry overlays that are only viewable through augmented reality. A “speculative piece of clothing in the age of data accumulation and machine learning,” like all N O R M A L S projects A P P A R E L provides as much commentary on the present as it does about their jaggedly rendered near-future. Data is already identity, network activity is already style (or more crassly, ‘personal brand’) – this project just pushes both of these truths to a logical conclusion.
Boasting “polygonal hemlines as sharp as razorblades,” N O R M A L’s data garments are viewable via an iOS app. With software development led by Julien Gachadoat (working in openFrameworks), the app allows users to point their phone at the A P P A R E L shirt (or a test image on the project microsite) and connect to their Facebook or Twitter accounts to animate the overlay based on personal network data. Alternatively, users can cycle through one of three ‘templates’ and see some geometric presets at work: facetted shoulder pads shake and jiggle, sinewy threads splay out, and vertical lines ‘rain’ down from the shirt.
A P P A R E L’s app is just a tiny piece of the much larger transmedia puzzle. Most crucially, an overview of the project is given in a slick Adam Curtis-esque documentary (embedded below) and the competitive catwalk culture the AR styles were born in is evocatively described in a short story. Beyond that, a video of the model 3PLUS3MAKE5 (from the aforementioned story) strutting her stuff was shot and a soundtrack was released; all of this material should be not just consumed, but savoured, as N O R M A L S are both deft and peerless when it comes to worldbuilding.
Project Page | AppStore | N O R M A L SA P P A R E L will be on display at “Coded Couture” (Pratt Manhattan Gallery) Feb 12 – Apr 30
See also: Delineating the Future – an interview with N O R M A L S
See also: Delineating the Future – an interview with N O R M A L S
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