A&D ANNUAL 2021
Darcy Altavilla
Emerging from a background in object and textile design, Darcy Altavilla is an interdisciplinary designer and design-researcher with a speculative and critical approach. Darcy’s research project concerns the impacts of online performances of authenticity, enacted via the curation of a digital body, on perceptions of realness for social media users and their audiences. Responding to this, Darcy proposes ‘HyperWear’, a series of six interventional 3D digital forms – referred to collectively as ‘Body-Interactive Digital Objects (BIDOs)’ – that engage with the problem through a subversive disruption of the digital body in performance. Each object in the ‘HyperWear’ series is informed by a participatory design research methodology – research that leverages contribution from end-users – in terms of both their form and visualisation. The interventional nature of ‘HyperWear’ is achieved through body-interaction, rendering the digital body analogous with BIDOs only possible in constructed digital reality. In this sense, the transcendental BIDO is presented on the same plane of realness as the digital body, confronting audiences with the non-real nature of the performed digital body. Through such interaction, ‘HyperWear’ aims to espouse reflection regarding the balance of realness and performativity in bodies depicted online.
DegreeBachelor of Design (Honours) / Bachelor of CommerceDisciplineObject/Applied Design, TextilesWebsitedarcyaltavilla.comInstagram@alt_dltEmailaltavilladarcy@gmail.com