Obscura Collective, 2019.
Fashion has and continues to afford radical possibilities for thinking about embodiment and anonymity. This is especially important in our present context where the body is increasingly imagined and captured as profitable data. The mission of Collective Obscura is to craft dynamic garments and accessories that undermine systems of surveillance and identification. We firmly believe that fashion can simultaneously be aesthetically forward and technically subversive, and that sharing tools to create and design such apparel is a vital practice in the fight for privacy. Our motivations are driven by a desire to disrupt these systems of identification and tracking by mobilizing the material properties of different fabrics to achieve tactics of camouflage, obscurity and opacity. We emphasize the use of craft as a subversive tactic of embodied resistance against centralized, mechanistic surveillance. Another facet of our design intent was to create a project that moved beyond the garments themselves. Rather than simply creating apparel and accessories to achieve tactics of opacity and privacy, we wanted to explore how the ethos of our provocation could be expanded into a larger collective movement. It was important for us not to just create fashionable and tactical wearables, but to also share the tools for others to create their own in accessible and affordable ways. Following this impetus, we established Collective Obscura, an ensemble of textile alchemists interested in using fabrics and critical fashion design to counter the ubiquity of surveillance technologies.
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Eleni Oikonomaki
Masters in Urban Design, 2019
Rashad Timmons
PhD. African Diaspora Studies, 2023
Lian Song
B.A. Data Science, 2020
Bryan Truitt
B.A. Art Practice and B.A. Cognitive Science, 2020
M.Eng. Mechanical Engineering (Product Design), 2019