Tanzmasken - relics of Weimar dance culture

This model has been trained on photographs of the surreal full-body masks produced by German performance artist Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924) and her husband Walter Holdt (1899–1924). The couple would wear these intricate creations during dance performances in Hamburg, which was a centre of an expressionist art scene in the early 1920s.

The masks were made from a range of materials including fabric, wire, wood, papier mâché, and scrap metal. The designs evoked both the natural and the mechanical world: insectoid wings and antennae, shaggy animal fur, but also googly-eyed robots wrapped in wires.

Although Schulz and Holdt's costumes were brightly coloured, the images used to train this model were 1920s black and white photographs which have acquired a sepia tone with age.