Helen Storey | Dress 4 Our Time

‘Dress For Our Time’ unites data and fashion to explore global migration. Exhibition at Science Museum: 17 August – 4 September www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/dressforourtime ‘Dress For Our Time’ - Holition’s collaboration with Professor Helen Storey forms part of the bigger exhibition, Our Lives in Data, which investigates the rapidly evolving role of big data in all our lives and how it is being used to transform the world around us. The Dress itself is a decommissioned refugee tent that once housed a family in Jordan gifted to the project by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Projected onto the Dress is a visualisation formed of 80,000 individual points of lights, each of which represent 100 human lives and the movements they’ve made around the globe, as per UNHCR statistics collected during 2015. The data visualisation aims to show the true human element of the crisis, creatively mapping the journeys people are making in search of a better life. Professor Helen Storey refers to the Dress as a “cloth of human purpose”. Through its threads, she explained, it’s able to give life and meaning to otherwise anonymous data. She hopes the project – a combination of science and art – will enable some compassion for a life unknown.