Maggie Orth - Statement
MAGGIE ORTH, Phd
Artist Statement
I am an artist and technologist who creates and invents electronic textiles at my studio and design company, International Fashion Machines, Inc., in Seattle WA. Electronic textiles incorporate electronics, circuitry and conductive fibers directly into fabric. My work in electronic textiles integrates computing technology (including electronics, expressive software, and sensing) with textiles and traditional artistic practices (including weaving, tufting, printing, and painting). I use my electronic textiles to create programmable color change textile art works, soft and fuzzy textile sensors and light artworks, electronic fashions, and electronic textile design products, including the POM POM Light Dimmer (with electronic POM POM sensor).
My passion for electronic textiles is multifaceted: part fetish and part reaction to technological sublime. My attraction to “fuzzy conductors” is essentially perverse; I am interested in active technology materials that are the antithesis of what we expect from our computers; fuzzy, soft and intimate. The electronic nature of my woven circuits is metaphysical. Even when an electronic textile is at rest, its hidden electrical potential is there. The hidden electrical behavior of a weave pattern or stitch is part of the experience of the work. Textiles are also intimate with our bodies, bringing to the fore the electrical nature of our bodies. (My sensors rely on the body’s conductivity to work.) Finally, I use electronic textiles to explore my own version of the beautiful and it relationship to the technological sublime. This version of beauty incorporates mastery, the magical, the physically sensual, humor and irony, the decorative, and the metaphysical.
As part of a larger revolution in computer art and design, electronic textiles give me an opportunity to explore and master an entirely new medium. From electronic music, to film-making, to animations created with genetic algorithms, computation is allowing artists to create new art forms and explore new forms of expression. Electronic textiles are a piece of this revolution and an unexplored formal territory for the arts.
I have chosen electronic textiles over other forms of computational art because unlike many computational and software based art-forms, textiles are human-scaled and made from physical materials. Their physicality and scale allow me to explore the space between material making, design, software and computational art in a hands-on manner that is enormously satisfying. When I work with electronic textiles, I am not remote from my materials, they are not locked in a computer, nor are they microscopic. Moreover they allow me to physically hand-craft my computational medium; to create a circuit and its electrical properties, contemporaneously with its aesthetic design. In this way, I can hand craft not only the tactile and visual properties of a tufted or woven structure, but its impedance and frequency response as well. Because my work is centered in material making, it is strongly aligned with the arts and crafts tradition, which assumes a deep understanding of the artists’ material and medium.
My choice of electronic textiles is also based on their intrinsic irony. My electronic textile artworks juxtapose two seemingly antithetical worlds: the millennia old tradition of textiles with its reference to hand-crafting, the decorative arts (culturally stereotyped as a lesser “art”), stereotypically female artistic practices, and physical intimacy; with the world of contemporary computing and technology with its references to mass production, high intelligence, stereotypical maleness, productivity, business, science and injected molded plastic. This juxtaposition of textiles and the decorative arts with technology raises questions about our assumptions and expectations for each area.
My fuzzy sensors and patented electronic POM POM are intended to be humorously transgressive. As an electronic device, the POM POM is a soft and fuzzy, designed for delight, intimacy and sensual experience—not productivity. Within the design tradition, the electronic POM POM, (as a functional sensor), also questions our modern preconceptions regarding form, functional and the decorative; it asks what is modern and what is contemporary. The POM POM is presented to you as a functional decorative element. The form of the POM POM is not just an aesthetic choice; it is functional. POM POM’s make great capacitive sensors.
My color-change textiles artworks lie somewhere between an animated painting and textile. They explore how time can change traditionally static media, like painting and textiles. Some works are more painterly with less focus on repeat elements and patterns, and some closely explore how software can change and effect pattern and motif making. Color change textiles also differ from monitors in many ways. Unlike monitors, the changing of color-change textiles is closely tied to the material and pattern of the textile itself. Sections of the textile can be different color but they cannot be any color. Software can control which sections change color and when. Changes in color and pattern are determined by the ink color, the pattern of the ink printing and the woven structure beneath. Unlike light emitting displays, color-change textiles do not light up, rather the paint on the surface of the textile changes color.
My color change textiles combine heat sensitive color-change ink printed or painted onto woven electrodes connected to drive electronics and software. First, the textiles are woven with patterns and conductive yarns. Most pieces are made using double weave and two warps. The first warp supports the double weave pattern, the second warp which runs along the selvages of the fabric, contains super conductive yarns that act as the “bus” in the woven circuit. Resistive yarns are then woven in the weft. The plain weave structure in the selvage electrically connects the resistive yarns to the more conductive yarns. Thermochromic inks are then applied to the surface of the textile. Mixing these inks is like mixing paint. First the “on” color is mixed (for example yellow), then thermochromic inks are added (for example blue) and the “off “color is created (in this example green). The selvages of the textile are then cut to create individual textile pixels. These pixels are then connected to drive electronics. Finally, expressive software is written. This software sends current to different parts of the textile, causing the restive yarns to heat up and the fabric to change color.