G Gallery, CICA Museum
June 7-11, 2023
2023.06.07-11
The Zeitgeist – AI-Generated Fashion Collection (Art and Artificial Intelligence)
The creative collection, the Zeitgeist – cultural cloth with AI, embodies the spirit of 21st-century design & art that digital technology is a tool conducive to creating and presenting artwork. The Zeitgeist collection is a collaborative effort of humans and AI in fashion and textile design.
Text prompts composed of multiple cultural keywords and specific pattern instructions inspired by African, Asian, and European textiles were provided to OpenAI’s DALL-E2. The AI created variations of textile patterns, some of which were serendipitously true to the intention of creating a culturally-informed design. At the same time, many others were kitschy patterns that were too stereotypical or generally malformed to be artistically viable. We went through many iterations of prompt refinements to arrive at suitable patterns. In some cases, when we gave more specific instructions by adding more exact keywords from the design elements, the designer’s name, or style, the results were far better than when the prompt was vague.
The selection process by humans is inherently subjective. We selected the patterns from personal experience and with the fashion designers’ trained eyes. After the selection process, individual works’ themes were no longer confined to representing a specified culture. When AI works were filtered throw human judgment, they became unique, independent, and individual works.
After the selection process, the selected patterns were transformed into engineering pattern layouts for optimizing material usage. For ecological sustainability, the textile choices are all in natural materials, such as silk, linen, and cotton. The technical construction of forming garments in each culture is suitable for Zero-waste textiles. Recall that historically, valuable cloth, such as Kaftan and Hanbok, must have had minimum cuts.
The present work is a modern take on a traditional silhouette. The design of the Zeitgeist follows many of the contemporary trends in fashion, i.e., sustainable fashion, genderless, one-size-fits-all, and season-free. We envision the fashion exhibition with three complete looks from each culture, a total of nine outfits with mannequins or live models (performers), depending on the venue and limitations. In addition to exhibiting physical objects, the projection mapping to the white cloth can be an option.
Bo Choi is a fashion designer and innovative artist.
With a primary focus on new media art and fashion design, she envisions clothes as both renderings explicitly their capacity to represent the self, as well as building upon, and breaking with, past conventions to allow an endless refashioning of the self disallowed by the limited vocabulary of much art and fashion today. For the last ten or more years, she has been known as a visual artist, a digital media artist, and a fashion designer and invited to numerous shows worldwide. She completed her MFA in 2009 in Fiber at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Her undergraduate studies were at the University of California, Davis, in Fashion Design and Studio Art. Previously, as a fashion designer, she created a fashion line that explores and transgresses the typical ways the body contour interacts with clothing. Choi’s solo fashion show “Second Skin” was presented at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. She was a finalist at the InspirAsain Fashion Competition, hosted by International Examiner, where her wearable art line was presented at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Internationally she has given her designs at the Wearable Art Awards in Port Moody, BC, Canada, and was invited to Spell on the City, The 7th Seoul International Media Art Biennale. In addition, she had residencies at Kulturprojekte in Berlin, Germany, and at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences in GA with The Rogers Fellowship for Textiles Arts at NMAR in Seoul, South Korea. She taught design for over ten years at Sanford-Brown College, Seattle, and computer graphics design/digital art at North Seattle College. Also, she was a faculty at Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University, Bloomington. Gallery IMA in Seattle represents her. Currently, she is a professor of practice at Tulane University.
