“Is it possible to explore the emotional value of humans through fabrics?”That was my rumination seven years ago, when I completed my service in the Israeli Defense Forces. I started to ponder how I could reimagine our standard uniforms (Madei Aleph) not merely with more comfortable fabrics, but with an essential bio- feedback loop. “The apparel oft proclaims the man,” William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet. Mark Twain added humorously, “Clothing makes the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” When people see a well-dressed individual they automatically assume success, but will we reach the day when the garment sees the person? Sounds like science fiction but the possibility does exist.
Loops, this is how I see the world, in my undergrad studies I specialized in knitting engineering. Knitting involved with a lot of mathematics and calculation and the software’s designed for the industrial machines are all programmed to be read in pixels – you draw your garment in those pixels’ boxes. I am fascinated by the idea that with computer-aided design I could explore various ways to adapt specific needs in fabrics.
I often set on my mother and grandmother knees watching their beautiful hands working the yarn into amazing textiles and calculating on a plaid paper their jacquard designs. Well, we are way pass that phases, now I can scan my drawing and the software automatically creates the jacquard garment, so it’s not science fiction to think that we can create coding inside our garments that will contain information about the wearer. Imaging how much information the fabric can draw from the human body.
Something else that I’m interesting about is how can we tell how the fabric actually looks like?! To transform the design in our mind into the physical garment is very complicated and what about errors, I need the ability to prevent the mistake in advanced. Those are big dreams I am well aware of that but comp media class is a way for me to explore the link between textile and coding. A few years ago, I saw Kristin Henry work and was very intrigued with how she used chemistry and coding with creating patterns - https://medium.com/@KristinHenry/artatomic-from-code-to-textile-a-creative-journey-62eb2d72765f.
Also, the system for controlling the supply chain by using pattern recognition is amazing - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334398258_Development_of_a_Textile_Coding_Tag_for_the_Traceability_in_Textile_Supply_Chain_by_Using_Pattern_Recognition_and_Robust_Deep_Learning.
Our first assignment to create a self-portrait was very enjoyable, I was a little bit frustrated with only using some specific shapes and had trouble with changing their direction (mostly the arc). I thought about creating the ears with arc shape but then realize it is much more easy to just create them as ellipses and change the order to send them backwards. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed to remove the stroke from only the hair, while writing NoStroke(); it applied to all shapes together, so I could not figure this out.
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