Syndesis: Linking the Representational and Simulational Qualities of Digital Dress.

In this research, I argue that the involvement of the participant in a digital 3D space is of a performative psychological/sociological nature, and I employ social realist ideology to connect programmatic syntax to meaningful and political semiologic rhetoric. I call this connection syndesis, and I combine it with the encyclopaedic multiplicity that digital environments inherently offer to produce an abstract but stable, organic, and procedurally self-expanding model of the fashion system. The practical outcome of this research is a study in designing and producing a game that utilises dress as its exclusive gameplay factor. I call this artefact Mannequin, and in it, play progresses through social interaction facilitated by choice of dress within a semiotic/programmatic model of the fashion system.