PERSONAL WORK

Iris van Herpen - Metamorphosis DC
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Shortlist

Title of Piece:	Iris van Herpen - Metamorphosis DC
Production Company:	-
Director(s):	Anna van der Velde x Grotesk. Group
Client:	Iris van Herpen
Instagram Tag:	@annavandervelde_ @grotesk.group
Short Synopsis:	The collaboration between Anna van der Velde and the artist collective grotesk. group - is a work about a visual elaboration, completion and reinterpretation based on Iris van Herpen's current collection "Metamorphism” and her examination of the slowly more and more concretely manifesting hyperreality in which we can now find ourselves. The implied identification of any multiple realities of ourselves in the post-human, digital world not only gives us a whole form of development and possibilities, but also takes over the old familiar world. In order to enter into a kind of visual dialogue and discourse with precisely this development of the human being, the film material - which was taken by Anna von der Velde during the premiere of "Metamorphism" - was used as a starting point for the training of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks). In the end, the resulting dialogue is regarded as a kind of pictorial argument for the breathtaking and rapidly progressing change between the actual state of a human being and the representation of his/her self with the help of contemporary fashion and the seemingly endless possibilities within the framework of self-development in both analog and digital life. The project answers the question of what we dream of becoming in the digital realm, taking our already existing self as a starting point. The datasets were trained on the individual frames of all the source material were used to generate new images and animations in a similar style to Iris van Herpen's collection. In addition shapes, lines and movement sequences that could be found in the video footage of Anna van der Velde's work were also taken up and recreated in 3D, animated and, like the rest of the footage, served as the basis for the GAN, which, like paint on a brush, reinterpreted the minimalist animations with the learned knowledge and eventually forms results that fit seamlessly into the history and visual language of the collection and carry thoughts on the theme of modernized self-development.”