EYES ON CULTURE #001
3rd August 2022
Zeitgeist’s Virtual Fabrics
EYES ON: geist.xyz
In 2016, the digital design studio ZEITGUISED created geist.xyz: a series of virtual textiles in no part based on physical fabrics.
As "the world's first entirely digital garment design" geist.xyz has opened up countless possibilities for what it means for textiles to be ‘virtual-only.’
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
ZEITGUISED is cool because it takes the digital medium seriously, creating something new and native, rather than just digitising the physically made.
If you like their stand-alone virtual materials as much as we do, we suggest you take a look at their most recent project: Bread Prosthetics.
OnChainChain’s NFT Wearables
EYES ON: OnChainChain
Created by Rizzle, Sebi and Miguelgarest on the generative art platform, Art Blocks, these generative NFT jewels are so much more than disgracefully cute.
With growing partnerships across projects and platforms, these web3 wearables aim to illustrate the importance of interoperability for our digital identities. As their narrative goes, they can clip onto their wearer across different environments.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
It’s all in the symbolism. Much like that cherished necklace that you never take off, a recognisable wearable that's metaverse malleable allows you to retain a consistent sense of self. Symbolic wearables like these have an ever growing importance as we navigate unchartered meta-territory.
Fabio Rovai’s Gap GANs
EYES ON: Gap x Dazed New Gen
Out of the project created for the Gap x Dazed New Gen initiative came a set of synthetic images by Fabio Rovai.
Guided by Gap, these images find their subject in the human form as much as they do Gap’s clothes. Rovai’s process included training an AI with images from the Gap website to then generate a new set of images (using a machine learning process known as a Generative Adversarial Network) that deranged their design.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Gap's GANs resulted in some seriously interesting images which, remarkably abject and bodily, play with the genre of fashion catalogue photography.
With AI-fabricated images being all the rage these days, another set might beg the question: why? where’s the art? what’s the point? But not these. Rovai’s images stand out as different, with bizarre characters these images make strange fashion's formulas.