21st Century-Imminent Textiles, Where Art, Technology and Design Meet

The onset of 21st century has witnessed a phenomenal period of change and innovation in science, design and art of textiles. Chloe Colchester in her book, ‘’Textiles Today” mentions textile innovations of two types. One that involves materials and prototypes that are so new that we can hardly foresee how the familiar functions of textiles will be transformed in the future, fabrics that can harvest solar energy, interactive digital textile displays, fabrics that are touch sensitive, primed to detect a faltering pulse or environmental pollutants, fabric buildings and fabric armour that can change colour, all of these manifest how textiles are being fundamentally reinvented for predicted demands in the century ahead of us. The other side of innovation involves responding intelligently to the textiles with which we live, an approach that can involve addressing some of the consequences and environmental impacts of more than two centuries of industrial innovation and international trade.

Textiles are a fundamental part of our daily lives and their development can never be solely characteristic to technology. Like food or music, textiles are at once one of the most and least localized of the arts, they incur their augmentation to religion, trade, cultural exchange and travel and their preservation to cohesive provincialism.

Cultural exchange was a major catalyst for the industrial revolution in the 18th century. In the 16th century Europeans were dazzled by the beauty and technical sophistication of textile goods that had emerged as a result of over four centuries inter-Asian trade. As early as 17th century both Chinese and Indian garments began to be worn European men and in the 18th century the influx of chintz, Indian block- printed fabrics and later Kashmir shawls, each subtly adapted to appeal to European women, led to the mechanization of weaving and subsequently to the development of the jacquard loom, innovations that helped to tip control of the world trade to the west by paving the way for the mechanization of other industries and eventually in the second half of the 20th century for the emergence of the digital age.

Briggs and Bunce argue that throughout history the legacy of technological breakthrough has been the adoption of stylistic change into the textile design practitioners’ visual glossary. Each change creating a visual language that contains a wide range of accents and which expands as new developments occur . According to Briggs, a 'new visual language' is being produced in the design of printed textiles by the use of photography and digital imaging. Changes are becoming evident in the characteristics of expressed visual language within the domain, in the nature of the symbolism used, the complexities pertaining to the image and the colours that have been used.

Hitoshi Ujiie, has explored both the use and non use of repeating pattern in his textile art. In his textile piece “Falling” ,he is able to convey the rhythm of repeat through non-repeating image and at the same time explore the concept of movement through image and motif.

"Falling" by Hitoshi Ujiie

The upsurge of interest in pattern formation in the natural sciences has been a great stimulus to many textile designers and artists. Linda Hutchins, an eminent textile designer having computer engineering as her background from Trousseau works with patterns that emerge when words are repeatedly typed on lengths of cloth or paper. The words are the kind of things that are said again and again: the admonitions repeated to children, ‘be careful’, ‘hurry up!’, ‘pay attention!’ or the female virtues believed to be necessary for a happy married life. Repeated on the typewriter, the shape of the letters and the intervals between the words make patterns as the lines continue.

Reiteration, 2003, series of patterned images produced by repeatedly typing words and phrases on an old fashioned typewriter by Linda Hutchins.

Across the natural sciences computer data are changing the way complex systems are studied and arouse growing interest in pattern formation. There is now growing interest in the way that life- like patterns emerge from a relatively simple rule of interaction to achieve a precarious and therefore dynamic balance between turmoil and order. Freddie Robbins, British knitwear designer has put these ideas to work in a piece called How to Make a Piece of Work When You are Too Tired to Make Decisions. Decisions regarding choice of yarn, stitch and when to cast are made by the throw of the dice.

Decisions (2004), Freddie Robins ,machine knitted yarn mounted on canvas

Decisions (2004), Freddie Robins ,machine knitted yarn mounted on canvas

Melissa Zexter, New York based artist works with embroidered photography where in she uses the merger of invariably advancing medium of photography and the introspective process of hand stitches that produces fascinating results.Her works stands as the representation of feminity and is often figurative. Embroidery is done on the digital photograph.

The dutch designers Hella Jongerius and Tord Boontje have both shown interest in incorporating random error into design of factory made objects as a way of imbuing them with the character that makes people attached to hand-made objects. In one of the designs, Jongernius used compilations of motifs from Maharaam’s archives of jacquard cloth to create a new series of woven and printed fabrics. Boontje developed a computer- animated pattern in which flowers could be seen to bud, grow and decay and even showed their dying petals being blown across the screen.

Repeat dot (2002) by Hella Jongerius, Jacquard woven and screen printed fabric

These above examples show how designers are beginning to open up the design process with an element of chance. Nevertheless, there is also something frightening about the way that digital media can produce forms of artificial life that not only replicate, but also evolve in a manner that is detached from subjective observation.

Also the last few decades have witnessed an immense increase in the ecologically influenced socio-economic trends magnified by growing awareness of issues regarding climate change, energy crisis and water scarcity. Although but when it comes to design and manufacture most sustainable principles are demarcated by the precedent of industrial revolution which clearly relied on 'heat', 'beat' and treat process as described by Benyus. Paradigm shift in the current sustainable technologies that focus on principles like ‘reduce’, ‘reuse’, ‘recycle’, ‘up-cycle’, ‘design for disassembly’ have certainly enabled a cleaner and efficient design and manufacturing processes.

Discussing about the various sustainable impacts of the textile industry, it is highly responsible for contributing to water pollution, degradation of soil and depletion of minerals in nature. In the current context, could living technology provide a new set of tools to assist our future world population without inflicting or corrupting our natural resources? Author Bailey mentions in his book , Chiefs, thieves and priests ,more specifically, could bio-mimicry principles combined with synthetic biology lead to a new perspective on manufacturing? If we still continue to go in the current pace, it would be arduous for us to sustain. Evolution is mandatory, and getting more efficient in terms of energy consumption and resource depletion also plays a major role in safeguarding the environment around us.

Biomimicry is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, as mentioned by Bailey. As defined by Benyus, Bio-lace explores the interchange of biomimcry, design, textiles and living technology to spawn new concepts and fabricate future reliant design scenarios. It is specifically concerned with speculative morphogenetic control of root systems for food crops for eg tomato plant along with producing fruits, in its branches also produces lace with it, or for an instance imagining a hybrid linen-chameleon plant that produces an intelligent reactive lace that changes colour and has the responsive properties of a chameleon’s skin?

Elaine Ng Yan Ling is a British Chinese textile designer's research project celebrates climatology that deals with nature's survival tactics and the project concentrates on engineering structures of plants and their self adapting abilities. She aims to translate these skills into textile to increase material endurance and propound a new way of creating sustainable material. Another textile artist, Jane Scott inquires into environmentally responsive knitted textiles for architecture following biome medic models.

In an era where the global environmental threats can not be ignored, the priority to design and manufacture sustainably becomes crucial. Whether working as lone designer or within bigger companies, responsible and transparent design solutions needs to be given a converse. However challenges are ineluctable and exist in both defining sustainability and also in designing according to it. Despite the eventual sustainable design solutions may only occur in nature, a resolution in reaching them can make a change.

References

Colchester, C., 2007. Textiles Today. London: Thames and Hudson

Quinn, B., 2009. Textile Designers at cutting edge. s.l.:Laurence king publishing

Quinn, B., 2010. Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology. 1st ed. s.l.:Berg

Treadaway, C., 2004. Digital Imagination: the impact of digital imaging on. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture

Benyus, J. 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: Perennial hives/2009/01/07/chiefs-thieves-and-priests/singlepage

Clarke, Simon, 2011. Textile Design. London, United Kingdom, Laurence King Publishing Ltd

Blackburn, Richard S., edit. 2009. Sustainable Textiles, Life cycle and environmental impact. Cambridge, United Kingdom, Woodhead Publishings Ltd

Quinn, Bradley, 2012. Textile Visionaries, Innovation and sustainability in textile design. London, United Kngdom, Laurence King Publishings Ltd.

Image sources

Letterology: Typewriter Textiles. 2018. Letterology: Typewriter Textiles. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.letterology.com/2011/03/typewriter-textiles.html

An Inside Look at Heather Ujiie’s Upcoming Exhibit at HAM | Princeton Magazine. 2018. An Inside Look at Heather Ujiie’s Upcoming Exhibit at HAM | Princeton Magazine. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.princetonmagazine.com/heather-ujiie-at-ham/.

Royal College of Art. 2018. Freddie Robins | Royal College of Art. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/freddie-robins/.

Maharam | Story | Hella Jongerius: Repeat . 2018. Maharam | Story | Hella Jongerius: Repeat . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.maharam.com/stories/hella-jongerius-repeat.