Friday 28 October // 16:15 // Auditorium

The presentation will introduce the E-Wasser Catwalk, an AR fashion performance that showcased 15 hybrid looks enhanced with animated AI-generated digital textures. The performance was created as a Master’s thesis project by Alena Kiarnia and Mohamed Hesham Amer, the media art students of Hochschule Darmstadt, and presented open-air on 31 August 2023 in Darmstadt as a part of the Kunsttreffpunkt performance art festival. The E-Wasser Catwalk performance aimed to draw attention to the water waste problem in the fashion industry. According to different estimations, the production of 1 kg of fabric consumes 50–200 liters of water. The approach suggested by the authors did not require any fabric waste or the production of new clothes for the show. In addition, the design of digital textures for the performance artistically elaborated on the concept of virtual water, which means the amount of water consumed during the manufacture of a product or a service. The presentation will explain the process of creation of the digital textures. This involved 3D scanning of real objects, extracting the texture images, and the subsequent processing of those images using AI. The result was a collection of animated textures that resembled the beauty of water. The environmental footprint of the performance is being calculated and analyzed now and the results will be included in the presentation. The presentation will also evaluate the role of AI in reducing the project’s footprint. Besides the presentation, we can exhibit a 4-minute film about the performance and (or) an interactive art piece based on the AR technology used in the performance which can augment the audience’s clothes with the digital textures.