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Co-Designing Fashion with AI: A Small-Data Approach to Generative Garment Design
Get PDFThis paper details a case study of implementing a co-design framework for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into fashion design through a collaboration between the researcher and a garment designer. Using the designer’s fashion development as a practical example, this research investigates AI’s potential to enhance creative workflows, improve efficiency, and facilitate marketing strategies that reduce the necessity for physical prototyping. The project implements a small-data approach, exclusively fine-tuning AI models on the designer’s sketches and the researcher’s photography to ensure highly personalised outputs. AI architectures, such as Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, are fine-tuned and used to generate sketches and photorealistic visualisations that work as an extension of the designer’s artistic vision while promoting sustainable awareness and ethical data practices. Through continuous dialogue and a final interview, the designer’s perspective was analysed, demonstrating AI's efficacy as a creativity support tool that streamlines design iteration by enabling rapid prototyping and ideation, while also addressing concerns about preserving artisanal expertise. This research contributes to the growing field of AI in the creative industries by demonstrating the value of co-design, small-data strategies, and ethical AI development to build tools that empower designers
London Lives
No full textFour London examples from the series 'Sites of Special Scientific Interest' included in the group exhibition 'London Lives' curated by Francis Hodgson
Attention of a Kiss: Exploring Attention Maps in Video Diffusion for XAIxArts
Get PDFThis paper presents an artistic and technical investigation into the attention mechanisms of video diffusion transformers. Inspired by early video artists who manipulated analog video signals to create new visual aesthetics, this study proposes a method for extracting and visualizing cross-attention maps in generative video models. Built on the open-source Wan model, our tool provides an interpretable window into the temporal and spatial behavior of attention in text-to-video generation. Through exploratory probes and an artistic case study, we examine the potential of attention maps as both analytical tools and raw artistic material. This work contributes to the growing field of Explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts), inviting artists to reclaim the inner workings of AI as a creative medium
How AI platforms are informing design for performance practice
Get PDFA Book Section that emerged from the 'AI in Art and Design Education Practice Sharing Day', held on 18 June 2025. The event brought together students, educators and practitioners across art schools to explore, implement and critically reflect on the use of generative AI in creative education
In the English Tradition? Rima Model Gowns in the 1940s
No full textIn 1939, Leo and Greta Neumann established the fashion business ‘Rima Model Gowns’ at 8 St. George Street, Hannover Square, London. Within just a few years, Rima became one of London’s leading wholesale couture firms. The couple worked closely with established English textile mills and innovative modern émigré textile designers to produce their garments and were known internationally for their quintessentially ‘English’ garments with a twist.
The Neumanns’ success was achieved despite incredibly difficult circumstances. The couple, as Austrian Jewish émigrés, escaped Hitler’s regime in 1938 and faced many challenges upon arrival in England. Through garments and archival material, this paper recreates the remarkable story of one of London’s most significant fashion businesses of the 1940s and its founders
Designing Counter-Choreographies: Embodied Choreographic Approaches for Critical Examination of Online Tracking
Get PDFThis paper describes a workshop conducted as part of practice-based research that aims at critiquing online tracking algorithms commonly found in everyday web environments. The workshop introduced participants to online tracking algorithms using a series of choreographic exercises that informed a discussion on the topic and strategies to counteract data-driven extractivist technologies. We analysed the outcomes of our workshop and showed that it allowed individuals to become more aware of their lack of agency over data harvesting and its use by digital services, and enabled them to develop strategies for reclaiming agency over their personal data. We discuss how the choreographic approach used in the workshop contributes to engaging people in a critical examination of online tracking in their everyday lives and to inspire forms of countering extractive algorithmic systems. Our paper contributes empirical insights on how choreography can be used to raise awareness of data tracking online
Rolling to “A-Free-Ka”: Seeing and Hearing the Transmedia Screen Worlds of Kahlil Joseph’s “Cheeba”
Get PDFThis chapter focuses on the screen text “Cheeba” (2010), one of Joseph’s earliest works hitherto neglected by media scholarship. By examining the transatlantic flows nuancing the aesthetics of “Cheeba” alongside the diasporic undercurrents that shape Los Angeles’s overlapping film and music scenes, the chapter draws out the screen text’s sophisticated relationships with the African continent, exploring how the project constructs in both audial and visual terms “A-Free- Ka,” a fundamental concept underpinning the musical work of Joseph’s collaborator Shafiq Husayn
Listening in 'Slug Time'
No full textThis audio paper takes place in the garden, a space of refuge and multispecies co-dependence, from the perspective of two people living with disabling conditions.
We are a sound artist and an anthropologist, also mother and daughter. We are both adjusting to alternative temporalities, reduced mobilities and ways of living by our chronically unwell bodies. Our paper meditates on how multispecies listening can help us to live slower and maybe better, embrace new temporalities and sustain practices of care within the garden and beyond.
We have been developing sound sitting, as opposed to sound walking, as an accessible listening practice. Sound sitting invites slow listening,” in every possible way to everything possible to hear” (Oliveros, 1998). attending to the small, mundane, and everyday sonic worlds within and between bodies - our own and the critters of the garden that we ignore or treat carelessly under capitalism. Inspired by crip time (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017), anthropology (Tsing, 2021) and expanded listening practices (Oliveros,1995; Shah, 2021), we become participants in a sonic network that extends to the semantic and the ethical allowing us to listen and learn from more than human temporalities- ‘slug time’ or the amorphous, sticky instances of slow knowledge production
The Locative Function of Situated Art
No full textThis article proposes a locative function as a defining feature of situated art. All artworks orient their beholders, but situated art is characterized by this context-sensitive orientation entering the work’s content. In so doing, it facilitates ‘here’- and ‘now’-thoughts, not only towards the “real” situation encountered (the work’s outer orientation) but to the work’s “virtual” or “bracketed” realm (its inner orientation). These orientations overlap, but do not necessarily align; indeed, situated works often construct a tension through a deliberate miscalibration of these orientations. But what is the mechanism by which such works afford indexical thought towards their worlds? Drawing upon Gareth Evans’s account of demonstrative content, I contend that sensory imagination—conceived in Evans’s terms as an additional conceptual component—plays a necessary role in negotiating demonstrative thought towards two (or more) separate spaces conceived as “here.” This is something the beholder brings to the work
Frantz Fanon: Fashion and Decolonization on a Planetary Scale
Get PDFThis chapter investigates how Frantz Fanon’s planetary decolonization project can mobilize fashion practice and theory into a praxis of global struggle against the systemic racial inequalities of the neocolonial, capitalist fashion system. I first look at Fanon’s life to establish why he placed his trust in the ‘Third World’ as the driving force of decolonization and how his Third World remains relevant to understanding contemporary fashion’s global precariat. Second, I explore the need for an anti-racist praxis of fashion based on reciprocity and transformation, two cornerstones of Fanon’s critical analysis of the lived experience of race. Such praxis challenges fashion’s hegemonic whiteness and racialized system of production, as well as its enclosure by national identity politics, making it conducive to collective action beyond national borders. An anti-racist fashion praxis, however, cannot bring about reparatory change without addressing the feelings of alienation perpetuated by colonial legacies. Therefore, and third, I recognize such alienation as a psychosocial phenomenon, drawing on Fanon’s interrogation of capitalism and the collective unconscious. I critically examine contemporary narratives that frame fashion as a means of 'healing' and 'wellbeing', highlighting their disregard for the psychological and socioeconomic legacies of colonialism and the ongoing need for reparations. I conclude by showing how a praxis of anti-racist struggle can reinvent fashion as the liberating possibility of becoming ‘somewhere else and something else’ (Fanon, 2021: 193). Fashion, when redefined as such, feeds back into the dialectics of planetary decolonization, creating the transnational solidarity and action our world sorely needs at this point in its history