Valentino has teamed up with Massive Attack musician and artist Robert Del Naja for a new audio-visual artwork. The project, titled Code Temporal, explores the creative process behind the Italian house’s latest haute couture collection, which debuted earlier this week.
Premiered today, the resulting short film contains “making of” footage shot in Valentino’s Rome headquarters, with glimpses of seamstresses, tailoring rituals, and some time-lapse photography of the work in progress. However, to give the piece a more experimental twist, Del Naja had the entire process be “filmed and observed” by machine-learning algorithms. After repeatedly watching the haute couture process, this artificial intelligence then played a role in the final edit.
According to Valentino, this collision between AI technology and atelier craftsmanship is a comment on the “symmetries between learned systems and human transgression”, and a study of what “mastery” in fashion really means in the 21st century. The final film – which shares the same title as the brand’s latest haute couture collection – is a collaboration between Del Naja, artist Mario Klingemann, and Valentino’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli.
Watch Code Temporal below.
