fashion

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is an ambitious and richly imagined project by Hyphen-Labs, a global team of women of color who are doing pioneering work at the intersection of art, technology, and science. The project consists of three components. The first is an installation that transports visitors to a futuristic and stylish beauty salon. Speculative products designed for women of color are displayed around the space, including a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software, and earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations.

The second part of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is a VR experience that takes place at a “neurocosmetology lab” in the future. Participants see themselves in the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they are about to experience cutting edge technology involving both hair extensions and brain-stimulating electrical currents. In the VR narrative, the electrodes then prompt a hallucination that carries viewers through a psychedelic Afrofuturist space landscape.

The final component of the project is Hyphen-Labs’ ongoing research about how VR can affect viewers, potentially reducing bias and fear by immersing participants in positive, engaging portrayals of black women.

(Source: MIT Docubase description)

A Pinterest board where pinned fashion photos of children are captioned to tell the story of little Quinoa and her rich and fashion-savvy friends. While not exactly a narrative, the board does draw a picture of a family and its friends that simultaneously mocks both the fashion industry and the showing off of children that can happen in social media.

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a generative, permutational graphic novel which engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

Why Some Dolls Are Bad was originally launched on the Facebook platform but has been adapted for the iPhone and relaunched in 2010. The project collects images from a tag-constrained stream of public Flickr images and combines them with fragments from the original non-linear text. Once the application is downloaded, image and text come together into a frame which is read and then advanced, creating an ongoing dynamic narrative.

Readers can capture frames and send them to an archive, where each frame becomes a “page” in the novel. The collective archiving of iterative captures from the project means that a version of the book can be read in a linear order.