First, about the website: click here to go to the site of designers Lucy and Bart. Maximize the window. Move your mouse around. Get your face really close to the screen and stare into their eyes. It’s uncanny! Morphing nothing new; we all remember it from a steady stream of ’90s music videos and more recently from the hypnotic Women in Art YouTube spectacle, but this interface manages to make it novel again. Maybe it’s the fact that you can see every pore in the high-res images, the fact that you scan stare into their eyes and manipulate their faces at will, coupled with a flawless, uncomplicated execution. Either way, the simple navigation feels immersive in an unexpected way.

The designers use cheap materials such as cardboard and pantyhose nylon to produce extravagant shapes. While most art clothing made out of bubble wrap, toilet paper and tinsel tends to resemble failed Project Runway challenges, the constructions here contain volume, depth, texture and, importantly, storytelling. The motivations for the designs are explained on the site as “an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body.” It is stated that designers Lucy McRae and Bart Hess share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression, and that unconsciously their collaborations touch on these themes, though it was not their intention to communicate this. Their process searches for “low–tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement,” stumbling on new constructions during a creative process that they describe as a primitive, blind search.

[Thank you, Nicola!]

Posted by Nadya Lev on September 3rd, 2008
Filed under Art, Fashion, Fetish, Future, Surreal