Photo: Tim Schork
Transcript
My aim was to get artists re-thinking lace motifs, and this was an important a theme from the very start – in fact driving the award. We wanted to foster a playful and inventive engagement with lace design, and this interactive does just that. This work understands lace as an abstract formative principle, a product of processes and mechanisms from which structures and patterns emerge. The artists have used behavioural-based computational models to allow the visitor to re-design fantastical lace motifs in different styles of lace, including knitting, tatting, crochet etc. and the results can be printed or laser cut. We have done several in the exhibition to see the end results. It's a highly interactive work, and the simplicity of the visual effects belie months of very complex programming to create this interactivity.
Pricking
MESNE and supermanoeuvre
Dimensions
720 x 900 mm (light table)
Materials
Animation and interactive multi-touch table: custom-made digital construction kit for lace making, developed in an open-source programming environment
Artist statement
‘Louis Kahn famously asked the brick what it wants to become, with the brick responding, ‘an arch’. Our project poses the same question to lace.
To move towards an answer requires understanding ‘lace’ as an abstract formative principle, a product of processes and mechanisms from which structures and patterns emerge. Some inputs have emerged from long traditions of craft and skill, while others are unperceivable to the naked eye.
Pricking is an interdisciplinary work comprising a real-time interactive multi-touch table and digital projection. Displaying real-time interactive behavioural drawings of network systems that were specifically developed for this exhibition, each drawing embeds material intelligence within a process of emergent phenomena through the use of behavioural-based computational models and invites visitors to influence the ongoing generative process that can be evidenced on the table.’