After nearly a year of collaboration across disciplines, students and faculty debuted garments made with textiles, sensors, and upcycled materials in Entangled Ecologies, a runway show that reimagined clothing as a living interface between people and their environment.
Organized by Dartmouth Digital Arts and the DALI Lab, the showcase debuted to a packed house in the Roth Studio Theater at the Hopkins Center for the Arts and featured 38 individual pieces made by 43 designers.
Designs included a plastic fishnet dress with circulating water symbolizing a mermaid/marine organism trapped by plastic waste; Walk-n-Type, a wearable device that allowed the model to work on a laptop while walking; and Modern Hide, a wearable architecture inspired by zebras’ evolved camouflage, designed to disrupt the computer-vision algorithms that increasingly track humans in public spaces.
The event marked the culmination of the CSDA 27: Projects in Digital Arts course, the capstone experience for the Digital Arts minor. Course instructor Kate Salesin, Guarini '25, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science, mentored student projects, created a couple of pieces for the show herself, and co-organized the event with Helen Deng '26, an engineering and geography major.
"I was very impressed with the students' creativity and ambition and the wide variety of technologies and techniques they chose to explore in the show," says Salesin. "I wanted to challenge them to stay focused on one complex project for the full 10 weeks and experience the big payoff of seeing their artistic vision come to fruition and amaze an audience."
The idea for the show came from Lorie Loeb, research professor of computer science and faculty director of the DALI Lab, who was inspired by an event she saw at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference, nearly 10 years ago that combined art, fashion, and technology.
"I thought it was just amazing, and I wanted to capture that moment, here at Dartmouth," said Loeb in a behind-the-scenes documentary by Axel Schulz '28 that captures the efforts of the team and the designers who brought the show to life. Digital Arts hosted fashion shows for a couple years beginning in 2015.
"It felt like a good time to bring the fashion show back," said Loeb, who got the ball rolling before handing the project over to students, the DALI Lab team, Salesin, and studio art professor Zenovia Toloudi, who was one of the show's curators.
"The show was a truly interdisciplinary event that brought together communities across campus, from computer science and engineering to studio art, theater, and film & media studies," says Salesin. "We hope it can continue to be a conduit between communities in future iterations."
Entangled Ecologies was funded by an Arts Integration Grant from the Hopkins Center, the DALI Lab, Digital Arts, and the Computer Science Department.
Watch the video
