Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

Joanna Berzowska
Krakow: a woven story of memory and erasure
4 feet x 7 feet
Electronic animated textile
ARTIST STATEMENT
Active materials (physical materials that have the ability to change
over time and be controlled electronically) introduce many exciting
opportunities for art and design, but also present many new challenges.
These challenges are not only conceptual (how to imagine
animated, interactive artifacts that have unexpected reactions or behaviors),
but also political, ethical, social, environmental, and cultural.
At the same time, with contemporary advances in potential memory
capacity, we need to ask what are the design and creative capacities
of memory rich materials and forms. What models of memory and
mind are used in designing technologies that remember? How does
our current generation of electronic textile and wearable computing
technologies allow us to build memories? And, most importantly,
how do we include the need, capacity, and desire to forget?
At XS labs, we develop electronic textiles that are extra soft and
react in unusual ways to our bodies and our environments. We are
particularly interested in the development of non-emissive, textilebased
display technologies. We develop textile substrates that
integrate conductive yarns, control electronics, and various active
materials such as thermochromic inks or the shape-memory alloy
Nitinol in order to build non-emissive, multi-pixel, fully addressable
textile displays. These displays are created using traditional textile
manufacturing techniques: spinning conductive yarns, weaving,
embroidering, sewing, and printing with inks.
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog Art Gallery Artworks
CONTACT
Joanna Berzowska
XS labs
3966 Parc lafontaine
Montréal, Québec H2l-3M7 Canada
joey@berzowska.com
www.xslabs.net/
COLLABORATORS
Christine Keller
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
Krakow, a woven story of memory and erasure deploys a simple
technology for non-emissive, color-change textiles. It functions as
a woven animated display, constructed with conductive yarns and
thermochromic inks together with custom electronics components.
Some of the figures in the weaving are overprinted with inks that
change from black and pink to transparent and back again. like our
memories of them, the people in the weaving disappear over time.
Thermochromic inks have the ability to change color in response
to a change in temperature, without emitting light. This is ideal for
constructing visually animated textile-based substrates, since
non-emissive surfaces are conceptually closer to the tradition
of weaving and textile printing.
Conductive yarns are woven together with insulating yarns to construct
a fabric substrate that is overprinted with areas of thermochromic
ink. Control electronics send power to different areas of
the electronic textile to generate resistive heat. This allows for the
creation of dynamic designs on the textile. Visual properties are determined
by the pattern and physical configuration of the conductive
yarns and thermochromic inks integrated into its surface.
Krakow, a woven story of memory and erasure is woven on a
Jacquard loom, which can create complicated weave structures,
including double and triple weaves. On a Jacquard loom, complex
and irregular patterns can be produced, because each warp yarn is
individually addressable.