Patterning : the informatics of art and fashion

The latter half of the Whcentury saw a massive transition from the analogue way of life to the digital. This thesis compares and contrasts two sets of binary patterns in this transition: the 'grid' and the 'loop', and 'representation' and 'abstraction'. My field of knowledge is Contemporary Conceptual Art practice, and the overlapping areas between three major disciplines: post-1970s visual art, fashion design and production, and digital media tools. The method is process-art analysis, in practice and theory. The thesis looks at several art and fashion case studies engaged with new media and shows that 'Informatics' also shares patterns with these emerging trends. The thesis argues that an important shift in the surface and structure of art and fashion and dynamic patterns in these fields can be relevant to others working in cognate disciplines concerned with patterns of thinking, imaging and coding: i. e., Philosophy, Media Theory, and Computer Science. New insights can be gained from a cross-disciplinary field of vision in this regard. The broad questions addressed in the research are: " Is there a vocabulary of pattern emerging between disciplines? " Why do 'grid, 'loop', 'representation' and 'abstraction' emerge repeatedly as pattems across such a wide set of disciplines: from fashion and art to brain science and pattem mapping in computer science? * What can we learn from documenting the apparent shift between product and process in these distinct fields? The research concludes that the patterns in art, fashion, science, and technologya ll showt hat we are in a transitionf rom a product-basedc ulture to a process-orientedo ne. In that spirit, the conclusionp rojects a collaborative future for fashioning culture.

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