textile – digital workshop

Description

Convenor

Tristan Dot

Speakers

• India Oswin, Paula Claire’s Text-ile Poetics
• Yaqub Chaudhary, The Algorithmic Aesthetics of Islamic Art and Generative AI
• Andrew Corrigan, Digital interstices: Universal wonder and imperfection hiding amongst the uniformity
• Abdullah Hasan Safir, Quilting and AI: Can We Make Sense of Data from the Margins?

Description

Textiles are material objects, which are produced according to well-planned processes. Such a procedural nature favours multiple analogies between textiles and digitality – and raises, at the same time, resistance to these very associations.

Weaving has become, in current discourse, a convenient ancestor of computing. By connecting computer history to a material craft, textiles offer a useful set of mytho-poetic metaphors: media would be interwoven in data flows passing through optical fibres. But the warmth, the care inherent in fabrics, and the healing nature of weaving, knitting or crocheting, contrast sharply with the uniformity of our digital world.

The idea of this workshop is to put the textile and the digital in tension, to grasp the actual connections, and the resistances, that exist between these two wor(l)ds. How are digital tools used to conserve/expose textiles? What are the relations between arithmetic and weaving? What would be the textility of our digital media?

In an informal setting, a series of short presentations (max. 10 mins) should aim to provoke discussion across disciplines and interests. Joint proposals, innovative presentations – from any member of the University of Cambridge (with a particular focus on postgraduate students), and from any field: media studies, art history/theory, architecture, archaeology, film studies, history and philosophy of science, literature, music, computer science… – are welcome.

Please send your proposals (150 words maximum), by 7th April, to Tristan Dot via td479@cam.ac.uk. If you wish participate as an attendee, please fill in this form.

Access

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch comms.events@cdh.cam.ac.uk. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.