The Digital Materialities Project is an transdisciplinary pilot project between students and staff from RMIT Master of Fashion Design, Master of Photography, and the Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity. Working with industry partner Splice Boys with funding from RMIT Adobe Campus, students are collaborating to create 3D scans of models wearing designs by students in their final semester of the Master of Fashion Design.
@rmitmofd @rmit_advancedfashionstudios @rmit.magistudio @rmitphoto @imaging_futures_lab @spliceboys #photogrammetry #expandedphotography #digitalfashion #webXR #RMIT_CreativeCampus
OUTCOMES
Potential outcomes include an exhibition of the 3d scans of the final semester fashion designs via
webXR augmented reality platform
webXR virtual reality environment
interactive data-projection
interactive web content
Audio ‘thelaurablair’ and ‘Djif Sanders – Stoking the furnace’
David Zeleznikow-Johnston
This screen capture from the program Blender demonstrates how a 3D polygon mesh body that has been processed and outputthrough Reality Capture is then converted for use inanimation. In the image we can see the underlying control structures, otherwise known as rigging, that must be attached to the characterin order tomove the body via use ofpositional and rotational data points that are keyframed and interpolated in the animation process.
In this image from ZBrush, the figure has been imported into a 3d modeling sculpting environment, where anomalies and holes in the mesh surface that resulted from the photogrammetry scanning and processing phase can be manually adjusted where desired. This is another point of digital malleability in the creative production process that allows for re-interpretation of the original material forms The phtotogrammertry rig consisted of approximately 163 separate SLR cameras linked together in an array. Students used Reality Capture software to take the images, and later to reconstruct the point clouds and mesh surfaces that became the digital models they used as a starting point in their creations.
Nattha Dhamabuttru
Cyber Pop Noir is an experimental game environment interactive walk-through experience that features the creator, Nattha Dhamabuttru, as the main playable avatar that users inhabit to explore the landscape (featured in the lower right corner of the poster). Natthu was captured during the photo shoot and converted herself into her own avatar. In the work, you travel through four radically different digitally stylised interpretations of Melbourne, Australia via riding the tram from location to location. Along the way, you encounter several Non-player characters that inhabit the world and wander the footpaths and roadways. These characters have also come from the Digital Materialities project, adopted and incorporated from several of the other collaborative student working groups. An example is visible in situ in the Unreal game engine editor in the upper right corner. The rendering to the left of the poster elegantly showcases one of these characters in greater detail, demonstrating a variety of poses made possible by the rigging process. For the animation and games students who worked on this, it was technically challenging at times to understand how to work digitally with the radical physical forms created by the fashion students. These costumes sometimes posed difficulties that they would not normally encounter, such as furry or spring-loaded headpieces. In these cases, the photogrammetry scanning produces some artifacts and glitches as some of these subtleties are difficult to triangulate with the array of cameras to exact precision. However, often these elements were embraced by the students as aesthetic features that enhanced their projects and revealed some of the digital materiality process. The interactive game was created in Unreal engine and featured several different environments/moments in time as a fanciful reinterpretation of the city of Melbourne.
2024 ISEA PRESENTATION
Class Tutorial instructions:
Shoot at Splice Boys studio 18 August 2023
INITIAL BRIEF
DIGITAL MATERIALITIES: piloting curriculum and course pedagogies using advanced imaging technologies in expanded fashion, photography and games/animation practices.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Across creative disciplines we now encounter a plethora of emerging and growing imaging technologies from accessible smart phone apps to high end high resolution advanced imaging technologies. Students discover and use these technologies for different parts of the process in practice, depending on the qualities of their discipline and how and where imaging technologies are currently used. Digital technologies across disciplines can be used to ideate, represent, produce, reproduce, dematerialize, communicate and disseminate or for some they are used all the way through. For others there are various shifts and moves that dematerialize; working from ‘material’ to the ‘immaterial’ and back again or in reverse. The increased digitalization also advanced by COVID –19 in creative disciplines means that where and how these technologies are used is in state of flux and is depicted in expanded fields where these various disciplines intersect around share usages and expansion of imaging and image practice.
However, current program curriculum and pedagogies across disciplines have limitations on how these technologies can be integrated into the curriculum specifically at Post Graduate levels. As part of the expanded dialogue of disciplines we need to consider the social, cultural, ethical and political implications nascent in the turn of advanced technologies; and ensure that alongside skill acquisition we craft projects that amplify students’ contextual awareness of what these technologies can do, and how the lens of practice might change.
As we consider curriculum architecture for these expanded discipline practices, we need to consider the social, cultural, ethical and political implications nascent in the turn of advanced technologies. Alongside technical skill acquisition, competency with workflows, authorship and authenticity concerns, how can we amplify students’ contextual awareness and how technological collaboration across disciplines can also respond to wicked problems, lead change in what these disciplines do and their social impact?
Our current program curriculum and pedagogies across disciplines have limitations on how these technologies are integrated at Post Graduate levels and how collaboration across disciplines is supported. Students are often forced to navigate without a rudder to decision making, usage, complex workflows and collaboration to use these emergent technologies. We seek to create a pilot collaboration and curriculum model across disciplines that actualizes complex shifts between material and embodied practices and dematerialized digital practices. This intends to develop approaches for course learning activities, assignments, and outcomes across disciplines through a pilot project proposed between Master of Fashion (Design), Master of Photography and Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity using an advanced imaging technology. The intersections, material and dematerial shifts will inform the questions students will face with these technologies and how the collaborative workflow and challenges. They will contextialise their work also with considering the potential social, ethical and political implications posed by such shifts to and from the digital.
WHAT
We want to develop models for collaboration between intersecting expanded disciplines.
As a pilot project, this will take the form of a dialogue across the Schools of Fashion and Textiles, Art and Digital Design.
We will develop a shared project that sits across courses in each school. In this instance, the project will explore how to meaningfully incorporate advanced imaging technologies into specific project centered and WIL learning curricula.
WHY
The last decade has seen a significant expansion in the disciplines of fashion, photography and digital media. The borders, particularly framed around the digital, that once delineated our fields have shifted and converged. We are using similar tools, aligned methodologies and creating outputs that share attributes. Our disciplines now have considerable overlap in terms of technologies and creative investigation.
This also talks to the ‘digitalization’ that has sparked cultural and creative industries moving towards increased ‘dematerialisation’ (Särmäkari 2023). Advancing digital visualization requirements have evolved due to the needs of film, photography and gaming industries that also provide new possibilities to the fashion industry with it’s heavy reliance on imagery dissemination (ibid.). For fashion, the key shift is to explore in the curriculum how fundamentally embodied and material practices best migrate to digitalization. Now all parts of traditional fashion processes can become digital, virtual fashion imagery, products and spaces (ibid.)
There has been also an acceleration of digital fashion accelerated by COVID-19 that forced wider sector change to digitalization of processes, products and user experiences (ibid.)
An example of work that sits at the intersection of our disciplines of that of Nirma Madhoo, a PhD candidate based in the School of Fashion with a masters in photography who is creating groundbreaking works in XR (see https://anatomythestudio.com). Many of our students are undertaking projects across these disciplinary boundaries and are asking for engagement with fashion, photography and digital design. Technologies such as photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and XR are used by each of these disciplines.
However, current program curriculum and pedagogies across disciplines have limitations on how these technologies can be integrated into the curriculum specifically at Post Graduate levels. As part of the expanded dialogue of disciplines we need to consider the social, cultural, ethical and political implications nascent in the turn of advanced technologies; and ensure that alongside skill acquisition we craft projects that amplify students’ contextual awareness of what these technologies can do, and how the lens of practice might change.
These cross disciplinary dialogues are central to the opportunity of DSC curriculum architecture and provide much richness and forward thinking. Indeed, we are seeking to align our curriculum with the contemporary reality of our overlapping disciplinary boundaries.
WHO
- Master of Fashion (Design) (Chantal Kirby, PM, & Associate Professor Ricarda Bigolin, ADF)
- Master of Photography (Dr Pia Johnson, PM & Dr Alison Bennett ADP)
- Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity (Dr Stephanie Andrews, PM)
This pilot project will work with master programs because all three programs are based at the RMIT City Campus. However, the learnings will be transferable to potential interdisciplinary collaboration at the undergraduate and honors level.
HOW
We will develop a pilot project to be tested in Semester 2, 2023. We will explore potential mechanisms and curriculum structures that facilitate collaboration between students from different schools. Initially, we propose to use existing courseware to explore the needs and synergies of cross-disciplinary student teams. For example, one starting point could build on a collaboration undertaken in 2022 between Fashion and Photography students responding to the work of Helmut Newton exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Australia. (See Looking Back at Helmut Newton: A Collaborative Student Project — Jewish Museum of Australia )
This approach seeks to find an intervention into current courses, where this collaboration could happen; operating potentially across courses and assignments across the three Schools. In doing so we look to galvanize the differences in current course learning outcomes and unite the cross-school teams around a question that will be shaped for each discipline and that relates to disciplinary similarities and differences of the digital. Through the practices and traditional processes of these disciplines the collaboration poses exciting challenges for how we move through dematerialization towards digital experiences and how each discipline might learn from the other.
We have a unique and time sensitive opportunity to partner with a company called The Splice Boys who have created a state-of-the-art photogrammetry rig (see https://www.spliceboys.tv/photogrammetry-3d ). They are interested in fostering the development of graduates to understand the potential of their technology and workflow, which intersects with fashion, photography, animation, games and interactivity.
We are particularly interested in creating integrated mixed-disciplinary teams of students in order to explore the potential of students to learn from each other in terms of their different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies.
In addition, due to the inherent material and embodied nature of fashion, this pilot is an exciting case study on how to work from material processes and practices to the digital, and how this might shifts uses and context of practice.
Academic Team: Associate Professor Ricada Bigolin, Dr Alison Bennett, Dr Stephanie Andrews, Dr Pia Johnson, Dr Chantal Kirby, Nirma Madoo