AWARD YEAR
2021
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure, Navigate Post-Factual Society
KEYWORDS
surveillance, fashion, Wearable tech, textiles
COUNTRY
United States of America
DESIGNED BY
Obscura Collective
WEBSITE
https://collectiveobscura.com/About
Obscura Collective
Fighting surveillance society through fashion
We are textile alchemists interested in using fabrics and critical fashion design to counter the ubiquity of surveillance technologies. Surveillance and various forms of biometric data capture have become the normative condition of our everyday lives. From the omnipresence of cameras in the built environment to the devices and platforms we rely on daily, these technologies are continuously indexing our identities, behaviors and bodies. While these technologies have afforded many conveniences, they have also been used to aggressively target, criminalize, and dox people, especially vulnerable communities.
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.