Connecting the loose ends
Through the PhD project, The Settlers – Towards New Territories for Design, a growing amount of data has been collected: facts, stories and discoveries. It is time to give it – this bodyless mass of information – a form, a material. On the one hand I want all the layers of information to be easily accessible. The information is worthless, if it is not shared. An interactive database could be a solution for a continuously growing platform for discovering and learning.
On the other hand, as a designer of objects, I tend to understand things better when they have a physical shape. It is as if the information needs to become tangible, in order for me to grasp its complexity, connections and overall picture.
Textile can serve as a metaphor for collected data as both involve the interweaving of individual elements to create a larger, cohesive whole. Just as fibers are woven together to create a fabric, individual data points can be combined and analyzed to form a larger understanding of the topic. The metaphor can also extend to the idea of a textile being a "tapestry" of information, with each thread representing a unique piece of data that contributes to the overall picture. The process of creating a textile can be seen as a way of organizing and interpreting data, much like how data is analyzed and presented in a report or study. This metaphor highlights the importance of considering the relationships between individual data points and how they contribute to the bigger picture, much like how the arrangement of fibers in a textile can impact its appearance and functionality.
In the anniversary book for Norwegian textile artists Ode til en vaskeklut, hymne til en tiger (Ode to a washcloth, hymn to a tiger) Kirsti Willemse reflects on the accompanying exhibition as a piece of tapestry (1). She pictures all the individual artists, their stories and perspectives as interwoven parts of one structure – together creating the whole. She also brings in time as an aspect, in context of the generations represented through the artists. And I imagine, not represented by the actual artists in this very exhibition, but connected through the act of weaving to creators of “all time”. Humans have woven for at least 27,000 years (2), and still today the main principles are still the same: weft and warp. In this way working with the technique and keeping weaving alive and contemporary, binds us together in an even bigger structure of individual and collective threads through human history.
In this project, working with both historical information, individual stories and future collective possibilities, the textile has become a natural medium for materializing and binding together the network of lines.
References:
1) Henmo, I., Linnert, L.B., Palmstrøm, S. (2017) Ode til en vaskeklut, hymne til en tiger (Ode to a washcloth, hymn to a tiger) Kirsti Willemse, p.7, Oslo: Norske tekstilkunstnere, Grapefrukt forl.
2) "BBC News - SCI/TECH - Woven cloth dates back 27,000 years". news.bbc.co.uk. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/790569.stm)
