unmakings

shuttle systems

images of scale model 

As an interdisciplinary artist, I investigate the animate nature of my surroundings—how everyday objects teem with labor, history, and the potential to change. My work engages the history of women’s labor, and I use textiles and thread as a way to make interconnections between historical and social ideas and material processes of handwork and industry.

My newest work, with a working title, Shuttle Systems, investigates weaving as the foundation of modern technology. Site specific to the Experimental Media Performance Lab space, which is in itself a network of outlets, wires, and computers, this new work acknowledges the space’s technological abilities in new media, by referencing the history of computing: a history which began shuttling in and out of the punched holes of automated looms. Charles Babbage, who is known as ‘the father of the computer,’ was inspired in his invention by Ada Lovelace’s Analytical Engine which backed the punched-card processes of the automated weaving machine, and by Jacquard’s loom which gathered threads through punched cards to regulate complicated patterns. With this dynamic history in mind, I am creating a large, immersive, sculptural landscape inspired by these punched cards and gatherings of threads.

Simultaneously and in conversation with the sculptural scape, I am creating stop-motion animation videos, where I abstract weaving’s inherent system by reconfiguring the threads, depicting the process of warp and weft, destroying and rebuilding. This tenuous, frame-by-frame animation builds upon and dismembers itself, under and overlapping systematically. It is in these microprocesses that underlie the software linings of all technology.