CorteX is a project that involves extracting and generating garments from the unconscious of designers. CorteX is part of an investigation into emergent design under the umbrella of Skinn. The project reverses the process of clothes design from an industry and media driven and derived procedure to an exercise that generates design directly and autonomously from the unconscious. The process involves a controlled hypnotic induction to access the inner mind and explores the idea of ‘intelligent’ clothing as an extension of the central nervous system. This anticipates technology, spearheaded by military research, that enables environment, inner mood and the community to be seamlessly linked into one continuous element. CorteX follows on the heels of Second Skinn, a well-received and widely publicized project that explores the possibility of emergent architecture, as visualized and extracted from the unconscious mind of architects in several countries.
Process: Select clothing designers from several different cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Los Angeles and London are invited to participate. Each clothing designer then participates in a one hour session in which he/she undergoes a hypnotic induction. In a relaxing state of trance, the clothes designer visualizes a unique garment, generated automatically from the unconscious, that he/she renders with paper and pencil while still in a state of hypnosis. Once out of trance, the designer is interviewed so that the specifics of what was visualized can be clearly recorded. The garment is then fabricated by each designer.
The projects are featured in a traveling exhibition showcasing each of these designs, together with a video that records the process. The show also includes an immersive and interactive navigable environment that includes 3-D animated (VRML) representations of the visualized clothing. So far, 4 designers in Spain have chosen to participate and have undergone the hypnosis stage: Antonio Alvarado, Carolina Azcona, David Delfin and Gabriel Torres
About the Artists
Marcos Lutyens’s practice has centered on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor’s embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. His investigations have included research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds. Lutyens has developed projects that involve our external surroundings. Works include interactions with pedestrian flows, social media dialogue, air quality levels, animal and biological intercommunication.
Isabel Yañez (i.yanez@teleline.es) is a Madrid based curator and writer. She is one of the main writers for the arts magazine Neo2, and has curated many shows both within Spain and Internationally. Currently she is working on a large scale sculpture-park project for the city of Ecija.