Static Resolution
So this is the one time I did fashion, designed a lookbook about Black Friday and developed an AR canvas!
SOLO work, model: Krystyna Pezinska
Role: Augmented Reality, fashion design, publication design, photography, editing, social media content, GIFs
Softwares: Nikon, InDesign, Laser printer, Photoshop, Artivive
Exhibited at Copeland Gallery, London (Every Woman Bieniale, 2021) and Truman Brewery (Made In Arts London, 2019)
Stepping out of comfort zone: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 (the fashion and photography, not the AR)
Before this canvas came to life, in 2018-2019, I designed a dress and subsequent look book and digital print canvas as part ‘90% off Human Decency’, a project which questions the herd behaviour as seen during the holiday "Black Friday". It is shown through the aesthetic of the zeitgeist of consumerism in the US, the sixties.
With the existence of hundreds of news articles and videos depicting gruesome scenes of shopping-based aggression, one couldn't help but wonder if this behaviour was slowly becoming normalised.
As lockdowns were announced in 2020, we experienced those scenes of mass hysteria once again... until they quietly became part of our collective nostalgia. In a shocking twist of events, solitude and loneliness made us long for a time where it was possible to act extremely in public, from our animalistic side trigger over a 90% discount on a flatscreen, to drinking ourselves in a stupor in the middle of a pub crawl. In 2021, I decided to capture that extreme side of humanity through augmented reality, a technique that merges the digital and the real, an interactive time capsule. Having gone from one extreme to another, one can't help but ask themselves, where do we go from here?
Once lockdowns were lifted, I snapshotted this behaviour and kept it as a digital memorabilia in the form of an AR canvas print, forever embedded in print and pixels.
The biggest challenge in this project was pattern-making for the dress, I struggle with 3D / spatial visualisation so the logic of patterns was hard to understand. The printing of the publication was especially difficult as I sourced sugar paper (100% recycled) to recreate te 60’s magazine effect, but overlaying the pages in a logical order to layer inks together was very hard. The fashion communication aspect was easier to grasp, as it was about communicating the emotional realism behind the feelings of distraught, angst and stress of Black Friday. I compensated for my lack of photography skills with art direction and aesthetic, through directing my model to ‘act’ through facial expressions and by using digital collage techniques for the final product.
The second biggest challenge was stapling the bloody canvas!
Another shot of the AR video ︎︎︎
Original garment on the runway (2018) Photo by Kelvin Yuen︎︎︎