alex.entick

Black Sheep

alex.entick

Location

sydney / Australia

University

University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Alex’s design practice fuses craft, technology, and sustainability to create meticulously crafted fashion pieces. Each creation, whether a garment or accessory, embodies a clear, purposeful design that is centered on delineating design principles to encourage new ways of thinking through design.

With a foundation in education from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Alex honed his skills and acquired invaluable knowledge in design, textiles, and sustainable fashion practices from a range of industry leading professionals. As part of his process, Alex adopts a practice that merges traditional craftsmanship with AI and technology, through textile manipulation in combination with AI-generated patterns, drapes and digital prints. Alex is committed to reducing his ecological footprint through zero waste methods of making and leveraging 3D design software to prototype design virtually.

Through his work, Alex hopes to bring to audiences a mode of discussion and dialogue that examines how contemporary technologies may be utilised for a fashioning purpose. He seeks to engage in discussion about AI’s potential and what ethical considerations need to be made to prevent it from replacing human creativity and what it means to engage with AI in a fashioning context.

Latest Collection

Zero Sum game

Zero- Sum Game is a collection exploring the use of creative artificial intelligence for a fashioning purpose. A long-form process that resists the contemporary AI design narrative as a tool for design from previsualisation. A questioning of AI and its purpose - what happens to clothing and the body when warped by generative algorithms? How can AI be used to create new outcomes without recycling the old?

This project is to be seen as a representation of a more socially sustainable method of engaging with AI by engaging with it on a practical level. Not using AI in the way in which it is intended and instead considering it as process of abstraction. In producing the forms presented in this project, I have created a crude dataset of patterns from sketches and pattern making journals, categorising and iterating with AI to be able to recreate rough shapes. Those results are then parsed through AI again, weighted with negative prompts to produce further deconstructed abstract shapes that are then re-worked into garment forms. The result is an exploration of collaboration with AI, as much as it guides me through a non-procedural process of digital deconstruction, I guide those shapes back into a physical space.

Additionally, forms utilise AI’s potential as an image-making art form to translate generated images of textiles into physical wearables. The aesthetic is warped, stretched, crushed and compressed. The choice to use stripe and stretch fabrics serves to link the distorted immateriality of AI to the materiality of fashion and clothing.