Third Skin

Third Skin. © 2011 Andrea Zapp.

“Analogue becomes the new Digital” in Andrea Zapp’s experiments in textile media narratives. Her work explores digital media and the mapping of collective space through fabric print, image patterns, embroidery techniques, and other formats of physical object and embellishment. Third Skin captures imagery of our social, digital, and urban neighborhoods and interiors and transfers them to fabric and dress design. Zapp plays with Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “clothing being an extension of skin, the way that media are an extension of the body.” In these pieces, photography, surveillance, and online footage become the sources for hand-manufactured dresses as media narratives. They map the collective and shared (images, digital and physical scenarios, and objects) onto the domestic: a one-off garment as individual statement and choice. Skin is explored as a media surface and as a metaphor for mapping and merging physical and digital realities. Zapp’s goal here is to establish a stronger emotional link between audience and media artwork. The virtual space is framed as the other place of memory and home by capturing it in analogue paraphernalia, modeled on and manufactured from the digital. Craft and media design objects and artifacts render the digital space domestic and decorative, but with the intention of provoking a surreal and paradoxical sense of longing and belonging to a parallel world. As Zapp suggests, “the idea of a digital habitat, a shared environment, is the main driving narrative in my installations, down to the actual physical architecture in many of my earlier works resembling physical living spaces, hotels, houses, and private webcam scenarios to create related metaphors.”

Third Skin. © 2011 Andrea Zapp.