Romanian award-winning multi-disciplinary design lab Foraeva created a sensation a few years ago when its founders - designer Lana Dumitru and architect Vlad Tenu - launched a sculptural biomorphic dress covered in crystals.
The inspiration in that case was a folk pattern from a traditional Romanian rug. But the pattern was completely reinvented and transformed: digitally re-constructed with a dedicated software, the dress integrated over 25.000 multi-coloured pixel-like Swarovski crystals creating three-dimensional patterns informed by complex bespoke algorithms.
The intricate construction was indeed made possible through computer 3D simulations, algorithmic design methods, and digital prototyping.
The algorithm acted in that case like human memory: a traditional embroidered pattern is passed on from generation to generation; here, instead, the algorithm coded and transmitted the traditional patterns. Yet humans also did a lot of work on this piece: making the dress was a painstakingly long journey with a team of 15 people taking almost six months to assemble the design.
Björk donned the dress during her Utopia tour in 2018: it was a perfect choice for the polyhedric artist as it symbolized an encounter of past and future, old traditions and innovative technologies.
Dumitru and Tenu do think indeed that, rather than losing our traditions, in future we will just see them evolving thanks to new technologies, and, to prove their belief, they have gone on to experiment further along the same lines.
Their latest experiments combining the Romanian traditions with technologies are currently part of Stratasys' SSYS 2Y22 Reflection Collection, showcased during Milan Design Week (until tomorrow). For the occasion, the duo re-coded heritage and traditions in ingenious ways.
Dumitru and Tenu took classic floral patterns from the Romanian tradition that was passed on from their great-grandparents, decoded them and recoded them again using symbols. So, from a distance the duo's white dresses and tunics seem to be decorated with multi-coloured embroidered floral patterns, but, close up, those patterns reveal themselves as being composed of 3D printed strands, tiny human figurines holding hands and even letters.
Stratasys offers different systems to 3D print directly on fabric, from its Polyjet 3D printing technology to Stratasys' J850 3D Printer (designs displayed during Milan Design Week were mainly made with the latter, a favourite system for fashion designers interested in 3D printing directly on textiles, such as Julia Koerner, who, in 2019, produced the "Setae" jacket with this printer).
In Foraeva's new designs the use of algorithms was essential to replicate the old century graphics and reinterpret visual patterns as 3D printed volumetric pixels. In these cases, apart from transmitting the traditional patterns to new generations, the duo created a new language and formed through symbols and letters hidden messages.
You can bet that the duo will take the discourse further: Foraeva trained a deep learning model to synthesise a huge library of Romanian traditional patterns to create a collection of Artificial Intelligence reinterpreted rugs. In this way the A.I. learns from the past and re-interprets traditions for the future.
Machine learning can indeed help analyse and re-interpret large collections of traditional textiles, rugs and clothing (from museum collections as well) and generate in this way a uniquely intriguing and innovative language.
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