ARTISTS:

MYRTO KARANIKA AND JEREMY KEENAN - Peacock

Medium: felt, spacer fabric, stainless steel knitted-mesh band, embroidery thread, custom circuitry, microcontroller, custom software

The rug as an artefact is so deeply grounded in our quotidian experience of the domestic interior and of ‘home’ that its presence invariably connotes a place of familiarity and comfortable care that invites tactile contact and encourages bodily engagement. One may slow down to walk on it and experience the sinking feeling underfoot, or they may choose to sit, or stretch out and rest flat on it to enjoy the comfort of its softness and warmth. Its haptic richness and proximity to the floor triggers sensory experiences that are embodied, or ‘grounded’, akin to lying down.

A collaboration between textile artist Myrto Karanika and sound artist Jeremy Keenan, Peacock explores relations between space and bodily expression through the novel use of technology and traditional art practices such as printmaking, stitching and embroidery. The work creates a sense of continuity that joins ongoing developments in the field of interactive artistic production with the long history of rug making.

Reflecting the textile references Myrto grew up with, Peacock’s pattern is a contemporary take on motifs one frequently comes across in traditional post-Byzantine textile craft. Hellenic culture has been inextricably interlaced with that of the Islamic world for centuries. The influence of the Middle East, particularly Asia Minor, is very evident in the themes and spiritual values underpinning Greek folk art as expressed through the use of bright, bold colours and the depiction of floral and faunal elements that bear a symbolic significance.

The visual impact of the rug’s patterns and colours, interwoven with the tactility and warmth of its materials, invites us to open up our sensory channels and to immerse ourselves in space through all of our senses. The work’s highly multisensory nature asks to be explored through the eyes, the hands, the limbs and the whole of the body; the rug has a transitional quality that creates space within space and signifies a plateau for different types of engagement and qualitative attention.

As different relations between people’s activities form and dissolve over time, they are sonically communicated through an evolving soundscape, the composition of which relies on the technology underlying the tactile sensitivity of the rug. A grid of conductive ‘nerves’ running through the deep tissue of the rug captures any touch or movement along its surface and transforms it into a smooth, open-ended, non-predetermined soundscape. The flow of data generated by people’s physical interaction with Peacock is passed to custom sound software created by Jeremy. The software uses the stream of generated data to compose an evolving, ambient soundscape in response to various performed activities. As the rug is being walked on, touched, stroked, and pressed, the sound software encodes these gestures on different spatial and temporal scales, continuously generating sonic output that ranges from short, staccato bursts to expansive, harmonic sound fields. www.jeremykeenan.info / www.callandresponse.org.uk

KNYTTAN & COMMON WORKS - Recounted: An Oral Sampler

Recounted is an exploration in creating a collaborative artwork using Knyttan’s groundbreaking knitting technology. As part of the Digital Weekend (20­21 September 2014) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visitors were invited to record themselves speaking, singing or chanting. This audio information was then automatically converted into traditional Scottish ­inspired knitting patterns, which were then knitted out at regular intervals throughout the weekend, before being delivered to the V&A and added to the artwork. Before the Industrial Revolution, most knitwear was produced by small groups of women who – as they knitted – sang songs together to keep count of the number of stitches. We wanted to recapture this folk heritage of knitting in a contemporary way, drawing inspiration from the communal approach to production and the songs those communities sang. Playing off the idea of samplers in both music and textiles, these audio snippets create the patterns that are knitted. Each line of Fair Isle equates to a visual communication of the pitch and volume of each individual recording. The patterns and knit techniques chosen to express this are all taken from traditional British hand knitted garments and samples found deep in the Victoria and Albert Museum archive.

FABIO LATTANZI ANTINORI - Dataflags

Dataflags deals with the notion of failure and bankruptcy in the corporate world; it focuses in particular on the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers, the financial institution that was thought to be too big to fail and which instead filed for bankruptcy on the 15th of September 2008.

Much inspired by corporate flags, which serve the purpose of glorifying the identity of companies worldwide, Dataflags is a screenprinted large sheet of paper, printed black on the front and gold on the back, to allude to the old standards (gold and oil), which served as reference to the financial market, up until the Bretton Woods system was abolished.
It is a flag, but one of failure and bankruptcy.

The artwork depicts a different insignia, one that might reveal the innate fragility of trust in a system that is entirely based on faith and common agreement, as after all the whole idea of money and credit, as novelist John Lanchester described it, is “a collective act of the imagination”.

Dataflags uses a database of the historical share price data from Lehman Brothers, in order to narrate, through the voice of a soprano singer, the ups and downs of the company; in so doing, Dataflags questions the authority played by data in decision making scenarios, with a particular relation to the unpredictable financial system, by highlighting the risk of seeing data as the oracle of absolute truth and data analysts as the new prophets.

The paper, which was screenprinted by hand by carefully layering Bare Conductive Electric Paint and non-conductive ink on a sheet of Somerset paper, contains conductive areas, which act as sensors and actuate the interaction; when the audience touches the surface of the flag along any of the large sensors and on either of the two sides (front or back), this in return tells the story of Lehman Brothers, by singing the share price of the company at a specific moment in time, starting from 15th of September 1998.

Every time it is touched one set of data is sung; every five times it is touched, a day of trade is being narrated. The archive of data created for the artwork allows for it to sing until 15th September 2008; the pre-recorded voice of the singer is being assembled in real-time, through a custom code written in MaxMSP, which gives the impression that a singer is singing each one of the thousand data entries, each time the surface of the work is touched.

By using a language that is known only to a few experts in the field of finance, but which strongly influences and shapes our everyday life, Dataflags uses the presence of a soprano voice to transform this story into a contemporary take on a tragedy of our times.

Dataflags was realised for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as part of the Digital Weekend; it was exhibited at the Guest Projects (Shonibare Studio), London, as part of the Executive Chair residency program and at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, as part of the Executed show. http://fabiolattanziantinori.com

JAMES BULLEY - Tactus

Jhe Tactus series is an investigation into direct communicative artworks for the blind and visually impaired. The textile-based scores are haptic sound generating surfaces that celebrate the braille music notation system of Louis Braille and the graphic scores of Cornelius Cardew. Tactus explores the interweaving of the auditory and tactile, and offers a questioning of the nature of art objects and their presentation in galleries and museums.

The wealth of existing artistry and research that actively seeks inclusion for the blind in public art is notable, but amongst this breadth of material it is apparent that there is need for an accessible and intuitive artistic language that can allow a fully inclusive and unique experience of art for the blind. Whilst the common translation of publicly exhibited artistic relics into tactile diagrams and braille-based explanations is vital, it can prove problematic. Relics, most often from the field of visual arts, are translated from primarily optical to primarily tactile objects, causing a marked distance between the tactile representation and the pre-existing visual concept. These translations cannot be the original artwork; they are, at best, inspiring representations.

In galleries and museums where events are held that encourage interaction through touch, it is rare indeed to encounter an object that has not been conceived with the visual aspect as primary. Sound-based art works offer a noteworthy and welcome exception to this standard. In the creation of a haptic-based non-visual language, a sighted artist is hindered from the outset. Haptic and auditory sensations are blurred by existing visual perceptions. Just as a visual artwork can summon haptic perception at distance through sight, a haptic piece can summon the visual. As a result, the tactile development of the scores has been made possible through the patience and advice of a number of different blind and visually impaired audiences, alongside consultation with various researchers and organisations, who have freely lent their time and experience.

The tactile score on display within this exhibition is composed of numerous ‘cells’ of braille and graphic notations that form an overall sound composition. These ‘cells’ can be explored by touch, with the tactile and textural patterns varying based upon the sound material they represent. The sound score does not operate under any particular time signature or fixed global linear arrangement. This allows for a dynamic recombination of rhythmic and harmonic score material and a flexibility in exploration by the audience.  The sound material heard from the work is drawn from a large archive of sound material recorded specifically for the piece in the months leading up to the installation. When a certain patterning of the tactile score is touched, related sound patterns are triggered from the sound archive and heard back instantly across a spatial array of speakers invisibly embedded behind the wall-mounted score.

With thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, Arron Smith (Artists & Engineers), Faye McNulty, Keir Vine, Daniel Jones and Havva Basto.
Documentation Portfolio: Printworks Trust, London (February 10-12, 2011)

Video: Intel Vice Creators Project interview for Score Study II. www.jamesbulley.com

SCANNER, ISMINI SAMANIDOU - Weave Waves, 2014.

Scanner & Ismini Samanidou. WEAVE WAVES, 2013. Dual screen digital video, sound. 3 mins

Weave Waves was commissioned for the Crafts Council’s touring exhibition ‘Sound Matters: Exploring sound through forms’, which launched in May 2013, and explores how and where the worlds of sound and craft collide.

Weave Waves explores sound, geography and mapping, how this data relates to both textile weave structures and musical scores.

Scanner and Samanidou have been inspired by the visual and technical similarities between the digital software they both use, the physicality of code and how this, in turn, relates to mechanisms for mapping cities and recording the sounds of a city. Samanidou recognises code as tactile and visible and Scanner sees code as hidden and veiled beneath the surface, but they both use a shared language of zeros and ones – of binary code. 

The work exists in multiple stages, with the video revealing the approach to working together, sharing contexts, and considering the commonalities across practices. The duo then developed a series of small woven pieces and a sound work, which are currently still touring as part of ‘Sound Matters’.

http://scannerdot.com

http://www.isminisamanidou.com/

PANEL SPEAKERS:

JANIS JEFFERIES

Janis Jefferies is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

She is an artist, writer and curator, Research Fellow at the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles which she established in 2002. She has edited numerous books and chapter contributions on textiles, technology, performance and practice research and was one of the founding editors of ‘Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture’ in 2002 and has devised several special issue for the Journal.

She is co-editor of the Handbook of Textile Culture (2016),  wrote the introduction to From Tapestry to Fiber Art. The Lausanne Biennials 1962-1995. Fondation Toms Pauli Lausanne and Skira Editions Milan (2017),  edited and wrote essays for TECHSTYLE Series 2.0: Ariadne’s Thread. Hong Kong: MILL6 Foundation (2017), A Reader TEXTYLE 2.0 FabPublic, Talking about Textiles, Community and Public Space CHAT/MILL6 Hong Kong (2018), and Philosophy of Weaving (as a practice / techne and/or as political metaphor). Athens: Nissos Publications (2017). She is currently working on the catalogue to accompany The Enchantment of Textiles research project with Professor Barbara Layne, Concordia University which documents 20 years of their collaborative, textile and technology based research.  The exhibition will be shown at the  ASM Expression Gallery. Art Science Museum, Singapore in 2019. 

Forthcoming publications (2019) include, ‘Textile Modernism: Transcultural readings of Maryn Varbanov and abstract weaving from East to East, from Local to Global’, for the edited volume Textile Moderne/Textile Modernism, Boehlau publishers in German and English, Polish Ghosts for Central Museum of Textiles, Lodz, Poland,' 'From Lausanne to Hangzhou: the role and function of textile biennials', with Dr Lee Weinberg for a Companion to Textile Culture, Volume Editor: Jennifer Harris and 'Performing/Provoking'  Transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research, MIT Press.

Jefferies is Chief Co-editor for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles (10 volumes) with Dr Vivienne Richmond (Department of History, Goldsmiths) to be launched in 2024 and invited by Dr Charlie Gere and  Dr Francesca Franco on ‘Art, Craft & Design technologies’ for the first volume of the three-volume Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, to be published in 2022. The volume, ‘New Media Art: History and Theory’, looks at the histories of new media art, and will be based on the notion that New Media Art is a highly complex phenomenon, and has multiple origins in various artistic and cultural developments.

Having previously held visiting professorships at Art Institute of Chicago, Universities of Wollongong, Newcastle and South Australia, Jefferies  was the first international visual arts, Creative Thinking Fellow, University of Auckland (which examined the role of creativity in the arts and humanities). 

Given Jefferies’ reputation in art textiles, she was invited to be the first international curator of the Hangzhou Fiber Biennial, China Academy of Arts, Zhejiang Art and National Silk Museums (2011-2013) and exhibited a body of photographic work in 2016. Pedagogical leadership is further exemplified by a series of Professorial Lectures in China since 2012 that have included China Academy of Art, Hangzhou ,CAFA, Beijing Academy of the Arts and Academy of Arts & Design, Tsingtua University, Beijing.

Since 2011, Jefferies has been an advisory board member of Aarhus University Faculty of the Arts, Denmark, since 2015 she has been consultant to CHAT, Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles Foundation in Hong Kong and is a member of the international advisory board.  In 2018 she was asked to be the international ambassador for both the Textile Society of America and the Textile Society, UK.

TINCUTA HEINZEL

Tincuta Heinzel is an artist, scholar and curator and a member of 2580 Association (Cluj, Romania) and of Paidia Institute (Cologne, Germany). Following Visual Arts and Cultural Anthropology studies, she has completed her PhD thesis at Paris 1 University (France) in 2012. Her area of research is the relationship between art and technoscience, with a special focus on smart textiles and wearable technologies.
Between 2002 and 2003, Tincuta was a fellow of the French Government, and, in 2005, a DAAD research fellow at ZKM in Karlsruhe. In 2010 she was artist in residence at KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien (Cologne Germany). She initiated, curated and coordinated several projects, such as “Areas of Conflu(x)ence” in the frame of Luxembourg and Sibiu 2007 – European Capitals of Culture. As an editor, she published Art, Space and Memory in the Digital Era at Paidia Publishing House (Bucharest, 2010) and coordinated Studia Philosophia’s issue on the “Phenomenology of Digital Technology” (no.3/2010).  http://www.textiltronics.com

ALEX MCLEAN

Alex McLean is an interdisciplinary researcher working across live coding, pattern in textiles and music, live interfaces for performance, software art, performance art, creative education and digital culture. He co-leads the AHRC Live Coding Research Network, and is principal investigator of the AHRC Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project, both exercising his interest in unravelling of technology and exposing of code as a linguistic, culturally meaningful medium. He completed his thesis “Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts” at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011, and is now Research Fellow in Human/Technology Interface and Deputy Director of ICSRiM, School of Music, University of Leeds.
Alex is active across the digital arts, including chairing the International Conference on Live Interfaces in 2012, organising over 80 “dorkbot” electronic art events, co-founding the TOPLAP live coding organisation, the Algorave movement, and Chordpunch algorithmic record label. Alex has performed widely at major venues over the past 14 years, as part of many collaborations including the live coding band Slub (http://slub.org) and with live choreographer Kate Sicchio (http://sicchio.com). He currently holds a Composer-Curatorship with the Sound and Music new music agency, and is working on the Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Music with Prof Roger Dean. http://yaxu.org/

DAVID LITTLER

David Littler is a sonic visual artist and curator, with a particular interest in the relationships between people, place, making and sound. Over a 25 year career he has been both creating, and exploring, the cultures of textiles, and providing opportunities for artists from different disciplines to collaborate, experiment, create and exhibit new work. In 2008, with the support of a Crafts Council Spark Plug Curators’ Award and the British Council, he initiated sampler- cultureclash, an international collective of artists exploring the connections between people, textiles and sound.
sampler-cultureclash has delivered over 30 performances, residencies, workshops and talks in the UK and internationally, working with artists and organisations such as the MNAC, Museum of the Romanian Peasant and Rokolectiv in Bucharest; c-u-m-a in Istanbul; Kaunas Art Biennial Lithuania; Ulster Art & Design Festival; V&A; The Embroiderers’ Guild; Atlas Arts Skye; Future Everything; The Whitworth Art Gallery; Fermynwoods Contemporary Art and many textile groups and educational institutions across the UK.
He has recently curated Yan Tan Tethera: songs of textile folk with the English Folk Dance and Song Society and Is She Blew? the sound of linen at R-Space, Lisburn; two projects that explore the once innate relationship between making, makers and song. http://davidlittler.tumblr.com / www.samplercultureclash.org.uk 

SUMMARY OF PERFORMANCES AND WORKSHOP

Performance – Alex McLean and David Littler

Yaxu – Live coded pattern-based techno Yaxu is the solo project of Alex McLean, live coding suitably relaxed techno including live remixes of his recent Peak Cut EP (released on Computer Club). His screen will be projected, making the code visible, so that the audience can see the flows of text and shifts from complexity to simplicity.
Kaunas will see David Littler and Alex McLean collaborate for the first time, combining their sonic practices inspired by textiles.

Workshop – Alex McLeanLive Coding Pattern with Tidal
Tidal is a language for live coding which allows people to make music from patterns, expressed as code. It has been developed by Alex over many years, initially for making broken dance music at events now known as “Algoraves”, and is now a free/open source software project with a growing community of users applying it to diverse musics. It will introduce Tidal’s notation of polyrhythmic rhythm, its library of pattern transformations, how to combine these simple parts into complex results, and how to use them in performance. In the process, Alex will also show how Tidal can be used to make visual patterns. The workshop will culminate in an algorithmic drum circle, where
participants will be able to copy and paste, and then play with each other’s Tidal patterns. 
This is an introductory workshop appropriate for anyone, including those with no programming and/or music-making experience. Participants should bring a laptop and headphones.