Practicing Fashion with the Anthropocene

Abstract

Odradek, a strange creature in Franz Kafka’s tale “The Cares of a Family Man,” outlives the narrator, thus becoming a device to think about a world devoid of any narrative necessity. In the story, Odradek sends semiotic ripples into the vectors of a future, where its reverberations spread into an ontologically withdrawn world, inaccessible to human thought. Odradek is a symbol, a strange totem of the agitation caused by the thought of human extinction as it embodies the fear of being outlived by a non-human entity. The semiotic relationship of Odradek with the narrator is synonymous to our relationship with the Anthropocene — the geological epoch in which human-induced activities have drastically altered the Earth (Crutzen et al. 2011). At the very core of the Anthropocene is a glimpse of a future in which the human subject, similar to the narrator, cedes its sovereign executive functions in the face of an abstract reality. This paper outlines my practice-based journey, seeking the materialization of an incalculably weird universe of Odradek into a speculative design object. It presents a fashion wearable, a face mask, captured through computational design and materialized through digital fabrication. Through this process of inquiry, the paper asks: how can we think and narrate a non-anthropocentric narrative or fictive thought? How can we mold, compute, and design fashion through the contingencies of the Anthropocene? The presented work explores the generative capacity of Odradek as a means of searching and computing an aesthetic proper to a non-anthropocentric perspective on the human body. I have used Object-Oriented Ontology as a means to access Odradek, especially the notion of a hyperobject - a thing of scale and temporality beyond human comprehension, as posited by Timothy Morton (2013a). The practice opens up creative research methodologies into a disruptive nomenclature by oscillating between the binaries of material and immaterial, exteriority and interiority, organic and inorganic. In the process finding, a practice is found that forms an asymptote with the troubled shores of the Anthropocene — in which contingent aspects of the real reclaim and fundamentally shake the course and hierarchy of relationships between human and non-human. In this regard, it twists fashion design practice with a narrative capacity that provides conditions for an ecological model of thinking.