Fashion & Branding Alumnus Denise Bakker wins Best Digital Fashion/Animation at Berlin Fashion Film Festival
November 29, 2023At the start of November AMFI Fashion & Branding Alumnus Denise Bakker won the Best Digital Fashion/Animation award at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival. The festival takes place every year to celebrate visual storytelling and apparel arts.
Denise Bakker explains: "Dramaturgy forecasts the ways we could (out)perform ourselves within Web 3.0, while losing touch with our ‘real’ selves being behind a VR headset 12+ hours, and illustrates the negative effects of this digital performance.
Today, Gen-Z spends around nine hours a day on social media, with one or two profiles to maintain. They showcase a perfect, cheerful version of themselves online, while suffering from depression or anxiety in ‘real’ life. Research found that the numbers of depression and anxiety among youth have increased and were particularly steep after 2011, due to the increasing dependence on social media. With Web 3.0 emerging, what will happen when we spend 12+ hours in the Metaverse, where having a cool character is key, and we will have multiple characters to maintain? Considering that any youth who spends 30+ min a day online is more likely to suffer, the risk of online addiction and therefore neglecting, or losing, the ‘real’ self becomes dangerously high.
‘Dramaturgy’ is based on a theory from sociologist Erving Goffman, about the effect of identity built around playacting. Within his dramaturgical framework, the self, is not fixed, organic, but a dramatic effect that emerges from performance. Published in 1959, it exclusively discussed offline interactions, but as we move towards web 3.0, what would our performances and their effect mean within the Metaverse?"
Credits
Denise Bakker | www.denisebakker.com
DOP: @paulineskoreng
Animation: @d0nn4s
Editor: Dagmara Kucińska
MUAH: @lots.looks
Sound design: Jurriaan Kruithof, @luca.ariello
Gaffer: @sean_louw