Digital fashion from digital waste

The African continent has become a dumping ground for the world's waste, particularly when it comes to fashion. With 65 million tonnes of used clothing sent to Ghana in 2019 alone, clothes that once traveled to be worn again are now so poorly made that they’re little more than landfill fodder.

This same disregard for reuse that is so infamously evident in fashion, is now seen in our attitudes towards digital production. The dark side of digital life shows its face in our digital waste, with US data centers alone making up 2% of the country’s overall energy usage.  Alongside storage units holding our wardrobe overflows, we are increasingly constructing data centers to carry our digital excess.

REUSE is a generative collection created by DRAUP and Senegalese artist Linda Dounia exploring the problems, and potentials of digital waste.

Inspired by the Baye Fall people of Senegal, who create their clothes by reusing scraps of fabric, REUSE repurposes the ‘digital waste’ of Dounia’s artistic practice to generate each of the 48 unique garments.

Linda is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates both analogue and digital tools, from acrylic paint to GANs and generative AI.

By integrating the byproduct of her work—the artist’s archive—into a generative system to produce something entirely new, REUSE explores an altered attitude to digital production.

THE ARCHIVE: What’s being used

REUSE takes the artist’s archive as its starting point. Discards from past projects, works in progress, or abandoned experiments — the archive is a map of the ideas and processes tried before. But unlike another artist’s archive, Dounia’s reflects her specific ways of working.

In response to the biases and reductionism ingrained in the widely used large scale models of today, Linda Dounia often chooses to create her own models to produce work. Using a mix of her own images, found images, and images of her own physical works, Linda creates tailored generative adversarial networks (GANs) to explore different subject areas. Often, she goes a step further, intervening with the GAN outputs with paint, collage and other digital and physical mediations.

The interdisciplinary nature of Dounia's process is reflected in the variety of work on her hard drive. A product of the many tools, Dounia has a lot of digital waste to work with.

THE PROCESS: What’s being done

To create the REUSE collection, Dounia’s hard drive is first made into digital materials. The discards are grouped and assigned material qualities, simulating anything from leather to latex.

Next, Linda’s archive is passed through a generative system where multiple processes acting on her creative byproducts result in unique, random expressions of her discards as fashion pieces.

For example:

MAPPING: A process of abstraction

Linda’s discards are expressed in each garment through 4 different mapping pathways. Each pathway has its own parameters:

• Uniform:
  Discards expressed directly

• Block:
  Discards overlap to different degrees at a straight angle

• Stripes:
  Discards alternate on a variable x and y axis

• Mask:
  Discards are mapped onto the garment through another discard

PLACEMENT: A process of creative direction

To produce certain styles, the placement of Linda’s discards are weighted across the different garment elements (vest, shirt, belt, pants).

The implementation of this generative process is core to the concept of REUSE in that it allows DRAUP to bring new life to old work — to create, not just translate.

THE COLLECTION:

The REUSE collection consists of 48 pieces.

Each piece comes in the form of a 3D glTF of the garment, which can be translated and worn direct to avatar, and 3 renders which can be worn on images.

In addition to the digital-only garments, a hero piece has been selected as an AR filter, free to use by anyone through the ZERO10 app.

THE SALE:

REUSE will go on sale on the 19th December at 12PM ET at www.draup.xyz/reuse

A select number of items will be pre sold to existing DRAUP & Linda Dounia collectors. Inquire at draup@draup.xyz for details.

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