If I am to say fashion and the digital, the first thing that comes to mind would probably be the changes that brought the so-called democratization of fashion through online platforms and image sharing, especially the social media impact. ‘Instagram it!’ – you know how that goes. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, the relationship between the two, every so often surfaces in ‘scandals’ over digitally retouched images of celebrities and models – those idealized bodies that here and there lost touch with an anatomical bone structure. What if instead of the digital perfected body or the ‘materialized ideal body of the models’ – as Franziska Bork-Petersen called it – we were to shift the discussion towards touch? Can we treat fashion as an ‘in-process-of-becoming’ digital skin?

| Text by Edith Lázár |

SPRLQDT presented itself as a capsule space, a backdrop where ideas and practices merging from digital art or derived from it, whether experiments and ‘orthodox’ media, could find a temporary place. For you see, the digital art scene was and still is to coagulate, but back in 2014, finding a platform for it was a constant struggle. Yet, between the hive-mind of the Internet and ideas unfolding in everyday conversations, rummaging through ways of visibility and exasperation, spaces can emerge; like this one, in a dome-like structure, 12 m², an oddity among the artists’ studios and galleries of The Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca.

| Text by Edith Lázár |