Gabon with Us - 80s Dance Party

Fall 2023

To share our discovery of how African textiles informed the design language of Memphis, a Milan-based design group associated with creating the visual aesthetic that connects people of today to the 80s, we created a virtual 80s dance party that projects the Memphis patterns, the African textile patterns, and the hybrid patterns that we AI-generated. The hybrid patterns reveal the similarities of iconography and sharp geometries that exist between both typologies: Memphis and African textiles.

As a virtual dance party gathers people from all different locations in the real world in one space, how do we foster connections in a virtual world? Our solution: shared physical objects that can be brought into the virtual space that has function and unites. In the case of the 80s dance party: pink legwarmers, headbands, armbands, and waistbands that transform into accessories with changing patterns on the dance floor.

Studio project by Maiko Sein and Al Torres for Foregrounding Background: Perceptions, Identities, Space taught by Professor Suzanne Lettieri. Thank you to Michael Jefferson for helping with the scene shuffling and Nadiya Farrington for the photographs during the review.