Intro
The chapters that follow have been written in this order, although they can be read as independent essays, not bound to one another by sequence. Each can stand on its own, yet they are placed side by side to form a chain of thought.
I aim to assemble not just thoughts and writings from critical theory, but also images found online, in magazines, and in other printed matter. I focus on the notion of the mood board, not as a neutral design tool, but as a moving surface of montage and contamination, where image and text meet, seduce, and transform one another, in order to explore the materiality of art and fashion, through the relation between imagery and text. I will consider the mood board as an event rather than a collection. Something that is happening. Through this imaginative happening, what new images appear?
I treat images as an eruption, an immediate affection that erases predefined systems already in place. The mood board becomes a moving surface where images are not static objects but dynamic forces capable of altering one another. Therefore, parallel to the written text, there exists a digital mood board, guided by an archival impulse, fragmented in form, yet holistically connected and not properly categorized. The mood board serves as a company for the written text, as much as it stands on its own as a generative work. In that space of reconfiguration, imagination precedes judgment. Images regain their capacity to move.
From the image, I move outward, questioning the autonomy of art, fashion and mass culture. These texts explore the different ways in which the three fields intertwine whilst in bed together, considering the unstable borders between them and their making of meaning through form. I look at fashion as the shiniest fragment of mass culture, where meaning lies in representation and form.
Ultimately, this text argues for a way of thinking that is neither purely critical nor purely immersed, but gelatinous, open to seduction, transformation, and excess. Rather than asking an image where it comes from, I want to ask it what it can become. The mood board, in its restless accumulation, suggests that nothing is ever singular, autonomous, or still. Everything is always already in relation and frantic contamination.
I hope that these agglomerates of images can surpass the divide between practice and theory. They should be productive instances of visualization, rather than static objects. The images are not explanatory devices. They can be a guiding force of the text, just like the text guides them. Faddy Images and Thoughts is intended to be read fully on this growing website: https://faddymoodboard.cargo.site