ANP000: Editor's Letter

Today marks the launch of a new series of interviews, memos and research notes from A New Plane, which we’ll be publishing on a regular basis on our website and Substack.

Part of our focus at A New Plane as a creative technology studio is to interrogate and make sense of the cultural and practical implications of the ever evolving set of technological tools and techniques influencing creative work. In addition to our in-house technical R&D, where we experiment with new tools and workflows, our written interviews and memos aim to explore and map the vast network of concepts, practices and questions arising from rapid technological shifts that are reshaping culture.

To introduce this strand of A New Plane’s research, we’re exploring some of the most prominent questions that have emerged from our work thus far. Questions like:

✺ How can we contextualise the explosion of creative technology of the last decade within a wider history of image making?

✺ Can CGI be thought of a technology for embodiment, to heighten our sense of the physical, rather than distance us from it?

✺ Is AI art mass theft, or should we simply accept that all media is training data?

✺ Why is fashion’s engagement with gaming often so awkward?

✺ Is worldbuilding becoming the dominant mode of cultural production?

✺ Where does fashion live in 2025?

In an effort to excavate answers, we looked to people whose points of view help us to understand the fashion and music industries from the inside out, the extent to which image making practices are borne out of technical experimentation and how systems of culture and its consumption are structured at scale.

Our conversations with designer Hillary Taymour and art director Charlie Engman of singular independent fashion brand Collina Strada, audiovisual artist Weirdcore and creative director Katharina Korbjuhn serve as crucial markers in our nascent map of the complex space we’re determined to chart. Of course, for every answer that sheds new light on our research, we are also led to many, many more questions.

By talking to pioneering figures from a variety of different disciplines, including artists, writers, technologists and researchers, as well as the collectives, communities and companies changing the ways we think about culture, A New Plane seeks to deepen our understanding of the complexity and enormity of this ecosystem by speaking to those who are building it.

As our work develops across the changing faces of the music, art and fashion industries, we understand the necessity to constantly iterate on how we define ourselves and what it even means to be a creative technology studio. Our ability to do this will be guided by the conversations we have with our contemporaries.

We hope you enjoy these first three as much as we did.

A New Plane