444.2: Posthuman Performativity and Diffraction in Fashion XR

Screen-based media, whose performativity as ability to effect material changes (Butler 1990) in its contexts of dissemination, is widely documented as carrier of ideology through examples such as cinema (Ryan and Kellner 1987) and the fashioned bodies it projects (Uhlirova 2021). While contemporary media content still often serves commercial and hegemonic interests, distributed access to emerging technologies for media production and dissemination has meant that diverse voices are empowered to tap into digitality’s new convergences towards disseminating narratives for social change. Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), collectively referred to as extended reality (XR) are some of the increasingly accessible modalities that can provide different and intensified conduits for digital storytelling. This paper discusses the VR fashion film 444.2 as a posthumanist project which presents African cultures as cultures of technology by scripting in fashioned black bodies within the broader themes of astronomy and outer space. As a response to the call for the ‘Forming Futures’ theme for the 27th IFFTI conference, this paper presents my practice-based research as an instance of engagement with emerging technologies as fashion XR. By dislocating the hegemonic narrative of a singular reality, this transdisciplinary proposition becomes performative of the diversity of the Majority World. This paper discusses 444.2 in terms of the production of digital fashion bodies and world-building in VR through diffractive material-discursive thinking as ‘doing’ Baradian ‘posthuman performativity’ (Barad 2003; 2007) and ‘quantum feminicity’ (Colman 2023), to pluriversal (Escobar 2015) and decolonial ends.