About
SOFTWEAR
DESCRIPTION
The Softwear Directory acts as a resource library positioned at the intersection of fashion, digital culture and artistic research. It aims to highlight and provide insight into a wide variety of digital (design) practices through the sharing of sources, tools and meeting spaces.
As our digital dimension presents a wide variety of multidisciplinary practitioners and collectives scattered across the internet, we can find many underexposed, independent, critical and networked ways of approaching, working with and through digitised forms of culture, fashion and identity tucked away in its crevices. This directory offers a glimpse into the diversity of siloed practices that use different vernaculars, but can be indirectly linked as a collective creative body as they explore (parts of) our digital realm in personal and novel ways.
DESCRIPTION
What is the added value of these shared sources and cross-disciplinary perspectives? And what impact might they have on our relationship with fashion? How can we incorporate, simulate or decontextualise their ways of doing?
By collecting, stacking and linking these modes of (online) doing, making and experiencing fashion in its aesthetic, social and political forms, the Directory looks beyond the material product that fashion offers. While some of the subcategories are highly specific, ranging from educational programmes and experiments in digital materiality, to critical and independent practices that investigate the production of value, the impact of distorted images on our online identity, and the ability to self-publish online as a form of hacking traditional (fashion) media.
The directory was initially compiled using a spreadsheet and has now, with a lot of help, been developed into a platform library, allowing more experimentation with filters, navigation, terminology and hierarchy. This online environment focuses on short, concise connections. Through the collection process we have found overarching and timely issues that deserve more in-depth analysis and exploration. To fill this void, we are hard at work on our first periodical publication, featuring in-depth readings, conversations and interviews to accompany the growing content of this database. Think of it as a hard copy supplement to this soft copy environment. We hope to launch our first issue in autumn 2024.
DESCRIPTION
This project was born from pure personal necessity and frustration. It is a result of archiving notes, creating spreadsheets, collecting books, indexing urls and filling the clouds’ capacity with screenshots in order to keep track of developments that live in-between the margins of fashion and digital culture.
The Literacy Index was made possible with the help of Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, and would not have been possible without the help of many amazing creatives, coders and critics that have lent there insights and expertise in the process.
GRAPHIC-DESIGN
Kimberley ter Heerdt
WEB DEVELOPMENT
Artemis Gryllaki
EDITOR
Name Surname
ADVICE
Hanka van der Voet
& Beata Wilczek