As a collateral post after our last one on Anni Albers, here we present one recent work by electronic media artist Phillip Stearns. Interested in errors, glitches and chance in electronic and digital production, Stearns is the creator of Glitch Textiles, “a project exploring the intersection of digital art and textile design“.
Fragmented Memory is a tryptich of woven tapestries whose patterns represent a snapshot of the author computers’ physical memory.
The project, intended to blur the lines between photography, data visualization, textile design, and computer science, is an investigation on textile as a medium for imagery and as an literal example of the development of automation: in Fragmented Memory these two aspects are fused together and the product is a visible representation of the processed by which data (and thus human activity, both individual and collective) is captured, recorded and transmitted .
Abstraction, as previously showed by Anni Albers in 1965, is present both in traditional patterns from South America and in Modernist fabrics. Stearns further demonstrates that the “patterns and designs locked in thread from the earliest times bear a striking resemblance to those formed by our digital machines today.”
Further read the project’s page for details.
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