Fast Fashion from Media Factory on Vimeo.

We are ‘glued’ to our clothes for most of our lifespans. Much of the clothing on our bodies are local manifestations of a nonlocal hyperobject: fast fashion. Timothy Morton describes these massively distributed entities by their ‘nonlocality’ and ‘viscosity’, “The more we know about them, the more we find we are glued to them” (2013, p.40). This is exactly what I wished to explore through my video. While we are obviously glued to our clothes, we rarely think much of it, so I wanted to explore how we are glued to hyper-normalised consumption habits, where cheap clothing is the norm, hyper-consumption is encouraged, and how the environment is harmfully impacted. I feel really preoccupied by Morton’s notion on hyperobjects, and throughout the studio it has become my main focus and the basis for which I formulate ideas for my media-making.

Looking back at my prompt 2 response to the Jem Bendell quote, I think I relied too much on broadcast news and less on my own voice, leading me to choose the ‘no news footage’ constraint, to challenge my first media work and to let my own voice through in the editing. Additionally, I was less concerned with alienating audiences. I’ve become much more aware of who my audience and the effects media works can have. Joanna Nurmis highlights the importance of “educating the senses” (2015, p.505), using art to imagine change. She also warns of the effects of the ‘sublime apocalypse’ which is so easy to fall into – to convey both terror and ecstasy simultaneously. This terror is easily forgotten by the viewer since it is experienced from a safe distance (p.508). I worked to avoid this by implicating the viewer by asking on-screen questions, and showing alternatives to fast fashion. My prompt 5 response was really personal, which is something that this one lacked. I chose the constraint of no human voices, so I did feel a little more detached. While I believe I communicated my own voice through editing, I felt I could have perhaps personalised it more.

I explored fast fashion’s hyperobjectivity through split-screen editing, offering a collage of sometimes jarring visual stimulus, along with a blend of textile machinery, clothing sounds, nature sounds and street and shopping centre ambience. I think this combination worked well to convey its massive scale, overwhelming the eyes and ears, creating this connection with seemingly unrelated images – showing fun movie wardrobe scene directly beside footage from a tannery for example. I wanted to show fast fashion’s hyper-normalisation in our society by documenting it, and suggesting we deconstruct it. Towards the end of the video, I blend the sounds together to a messy rhythm before abruptly cutting to silence and a black screen. I did this as a way to cut through the fast fashion discourse, to tell the viewer and the video itself to ‘slow down’. I originally had that written as text on screen, but decided there was no need for it, as the silence and blackness communicated the same thing.

Johns-Putra proposes the need for ecocriticism to have tangible effects on the physical world, aided by a “recalibration of theoretical knowledge” (2013, p.9). Creating media works and ecocritical works are more suited to change perceptions, dismantle already existing ideas and propose new ones. But now, for climate change, we want to do both. Ultimately, I’m appealing to the clothing consumer to become explicitly aware of the scale effects our clothing has on the planet, and to hopefully influence their future consumption decisions.

References:

Johns-Putra, A 2013, ‘A New Critical Climate’, Symploke, vol. 21, no.1-2, p. 7-10.

Morton, T 2013, ‘Poisoned ground: art and philosophy in the time of hyperobjects’, Sylmpoke, vol. 21, no.1-2, pp. 37-50.

Nurmis, J 2016, ‘Visual climate change art 2005–2015: discourse and practice’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 501-516.