444.2 | Fashion XR

444.2 draws from techniques of filmmaking, fashion performance and taps into the affordances of digital technology to create an experimental piece with a high production value. 444.2 was made using digital and game design tools in collaboration with professional teams and artists across different countries including Australia, South Africa, and Mauritius. Photogrammetry scans and LiDAR scans of the SALT terrain and Large Telescope observatory in South Africa was done concurrently with volumetric production, including costume and choreography in Melbourne.

Naarm-based Jessie Oshodi, a performer of African diasporic origins was cast as the main talent. The soundtrack featuring an original Afro-diasporic score was recorded featuring artists based in South Africa and Mauritius. For this project involving a social dimension, it was important to work with people from diverse communities and situated in actual places in order to underscore the importance of the physical bodies and material processes that underpin digital design and the concept of humanity as dispersed on a planetary scale, yet connected in our differences as positive attributes, by the matter that we are made of.  444.2 was directed and project-managed from Melbourne with international stakeholders who advised towards the team meeting the design brief.

The final design implemented for viewing in real-time on VR headsets and with an AR component were initially piloted in Lagos; and in Johannesburg in a public-facing context, where audience response exceeded the expectations set by the brief. ‘444.2’ has been subsequently exhibited in Australia and internationally on specialist and public-facing platforms supporting the showcase of XR works.

444.2 is an evocative, embodied passage through an atmospheric, virtual environment, ascending to the stars. The design uses several strategies for world-building, including considered art direction, choreographed movement, particle systems and spatial sound design to output a carefully considered and immersive environment that is visually haptic and kinaesthetic.

As part of its design, 444.2 weaves in African cosmological concepts which do not separate technology from magic - or science from spirituality. Users have described the experience as mesmerising and hypnotic; a world they did not want to leave, or which they would like to revisit.

By proposing that fashion media in its digital, virtual configuration, and in its collision with new realities can be designed for critical yet generative engagement with the world, 444.2 embeds excellence in design from the perspective of sustainable principles understood from a position of social justice within a broader ethical framework.

444.2 is the first fashion performance-based experience of its kind to use volumetric filming for a real-time Virtual Reality 6 Degrees-of-Freedom experience. By using a volumetric capture system (Depthkit), the project 3D-filmed the talent performing costume and textiles with different surface properties in motion for reconstruction in a game engine space, offering new value propositions for how fashion can be embodied in the digital space.

Fashion produces a specific type of media evoking an idealised notion of the fashion body, while digital design in its expression through game contexts can have specific typologies and aesthetic sensibilities. 444.2 is located between these two, and by means of its critical intent, creates something original and unexpected.

Being transdisciplinary, 444.2 continues to show across an international immersive cinema context, fashion, computational and digital art & design conferences and platforms, where it is somehow unique in its use of gesture, music and costumed performance and application of emerging technology for storytelling.

As an embodied, affective experience that is uplifting, 444.2 simultaneously carries a political message. These two are not often proposed in tandem. This entry works against the widespread misrepresentation and stereotyping of BIPOC people by presenting the specific case of African cultures as cultures of technology. It confounds the separation of siloed disciplines in an instantiation of design that is pluriversal.

According to the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, "no one is safe until everyone is safe". A prosperous future is a future where everyone sees themselves as an equal and valued part amongst the interconnected many. Especially relevant in the sociopolitical climate of 2025, 444.2 as a speculative and pluriversal proposition, hopes to mobilise its audience towards feeling this interconnectedness. Conceptualised and mainly produced locally, 444.2 builds on, and contributes to Victorias creative culture as diverse and open to design towards regenerative and reconciliatory purposes.