Open forum: dressing the technological body: fashioning robots, avatars, and hybrid selves towards a meta-future

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the interplay between adornment, fashion and digital embodiment within the emergent socio-material landscape of humanoid robotics and avatar creativity in the context of the digital human twin, (DHT). It examines how the act of dressing this technological body-whether physical, virtual, or hybrid in form, becomes a site of cultural meaning, aesthetic expression and a tool to prompt new creative and empathic futures for DHT. It seeks to explore liminal environments into and out of the DHT, wrangling with terms to describe this emergent landscape to highlight the incomplete definition of DTH. Defining the edges of this as a future practice allows consideration of what may be dialled up or dialled down in DHT development and how cultural knowledge, time and creativity expressed through fashion and adornment, can be performed to prototype ongoing development. This process will have influence on alternative modes of production, warranting an authentic and human pipeline to consider DHT futures.