The online exhibit »Calico« makes fabric samples from 200 years of European fashion and design history available to the public digitally and shows them in a new, surprising form:
In the State Textile and Industry Museum Augsburg (tim) there is a unique collection with over 550 textile sample books. The books come from the estate of the Neue Augsburger Kattunfabrik (NAK) and thus provide an almost complete documentation of the company's history. They contain well over a million fabric print samples from a period from 1792 to 1996.
The interactive platform we designed contains more than 3.000 of these patterns which can now be sensually experienced and, moreover, completely precessed new with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Visitors can immerse themselves in the tim's model treasure on three levels: sort and discover, select and design and experience in a different way.
To sort them by similarity, the patterns were analyzed with the »Mobile-NetV2« image classifier, the »UMAP« algorithm was used for the arrangement.
The generation of new futuristic patterns inspired by the existing ones is based on the GAN model »StyleGAN2-ADA« from Nvidia trained with the original patterns and the analysis of those with the classification model »VGG16«.
