Poetic Realism

I am going to join a workshop about OLED, in London. The workshop is part of the OLED Lighting Design Summit. This years focus is on applications, using the unique properties of OLED to open new market areas, securing the future expansion of the Lighting industry and this exciting technology.

What is an OLED?
It is an organic light emitting diode (OLED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compounds which emit light in response to an electric current. This layer of organic semiconductor material is situated between two electrodes. Generally, at least one of these electrodes is transparent. (Source: wikipedia.)

It is a very thin – paperalike material. It can even be folded. Its properties: thin, transparent, foldable, printable (liquid substanse), homogenous output, unusual appearance, low heat emission and high degree of controllability. That is what I found on the web.
There are several aspect that come with OLED light that pose an interest to a textiledesigner / artist. Its properties makes it possible to include in the very process of making / designing.

OLED and its creative possibilties.
My interest in that material is that I would like to experiment with the weaving technique. To find a way to embedd the material within the textile structure. In its tectonic.

Today´s materialtechnology enables textiles, and the making of textiles, to be more than just that. E-textiles, also known as electronic textiles or smart textiles, are fabrics that enable computing, digital components, and electronics to be embedded in them. Maybe textiles can contribute to create a new form of architecture? The term architextiles is a fusion between architecture and textiles, using textiles tectonic and architectures application. New materials (f ex carbonfiber ) could create a new understanding of architecture, a new shape of walls – and spaces.

OLED is a material that can certainly interact with its surrounding, viewer or architecture. It can lighten up the space. It can be a lightsource, a lamp. Embedded light. Something that could be interesting in terms of lightning, to create a lightsource that is not pointy – like light sources we have today. Pointy light from above. Embedding it into the architecture can deliver a light from the side or from below. Light intensity will be different too, a soft bright (day?) light?

OLED can be, in combination with printing – a decorative element: as an electrolumiscence paper. Maybe the lightemitting substance can be applied on fiber? And later woven and transformed into a 3 dimensional object?

The weaving technique poses for me a fine way to create. To create surfaces that can be transformed through different transformatioal processes into spatial shapes. To create architextiles.

OLED and the aspect of ecology
OLED have a very low energy consumption, and in combination to intelligent electronics they can contribute to sustainability.

OLED used in the arts
The London based design studio made an interactive OLED Installation called “You Fade To Light” in collaboration with Philips. They used the material Lumiblade OLED´s to create a wall of light which reacts to people´s movement. Watch a presentation of the work here. It shows the wall of light in combination with 2 contemporary dancers. “You Fade To Light”.

Another work that explores the artistic possibilities of small OLED displays is the design work by Jason Bruges called Mimosa. Using Philips Lumiblade , networked together in a series of flowerlike modules that open and close in the presence of visitors, like the rapid moving plant – Mimosa. The work was shown at the Milan furniture fair in 2010.

I am looking forward to join the hands on workshop on OLED by E2M Technology. Hoping to learn about OLED, its aspect of ecology and especially how to make an OLED, to get an overview of the material science – how is a OLED made. This is important to understand how to use it in creative products. To twist its appearance, and find ways of embedding it into the weaving / textile. And I am looking forward to be part of the Designer input panel – to discuss the possibilities for OLED. Part of that panel will be Arfon Davies, Associate Director, ARUP, Mark Ridler, Lighting Director, BDP, Steve Philips, Lead Product Designer, ARUP and myself. Visit homepage of ARUP. Visit homepage of BDP .

My interest at the conference will be, besides to look closer on the actual creation of an OLED, where will OLED position itstelf in the sustainable debate?
a – I would like to hear more about the substance. phosphor – how poisonouse (are there excisting certificates?)
b – What about the connection to solar cells. Theme here: energy harvesting, zero carbon houses.
c – What about the relation price – production.
d – How portable / wearable is the technology of OLED?
e – What about the humanitary background, maybe we should check what this technology can do – with case studies – for low developed countries. Like f ex the portable light project by KVA : Kennedy & Violich Architecture. They developed a non profit research project with the aim to deliver renewable power and light to the developing world. it is a portable light unit. simple, versatile, with flexible photovoltaics (solar).

I think the technology of OLED came a long way – but yet the focus lays on objects / design products. Next step could be to open it up for new creative hybrids, for example architextiles.

I created a new category: Inspirations. Motivation for that is to A) archive my knowledge sources B) make it public to share and C) hopefully create a kind of inspiration moodboard for my work and art practice. First of are 2 lectures of 2 of my main inspiration sources: Rem Koolhaas and Petra Blaisse. Both challenge the classical understanding of the term architecture (Rem) and Textiles (Petra).

I visited Rem Koolhaas Content exhibition in Berlin, a very rich creative fresh looking upon architecture show, showing as well works of the AMO lab, the research lab of OMA / Office for Metropolitan Architecture where Rem Koolhaas is a founding partner. Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and in 2008 Time put him in their top 100 of The World’s Most Influential People.[1] (wikipedia). Listen to his lecture here: OMA*AMO; What Architecture Can Do?

My first contact with the work of Petra Blaisse happened to be at the Enmeshed Seminar I visited in 2010 at the KonstFack in Stockholm / Sweden. She is a Dutch designer and works in a multitude of creative areas, including textile, landscape and exhibition design. She founded Inside Outside. Unique in its genre, the firm combine expertise in various fields including landscape architecture, textile design and interior design. Wikipedia. Listen to her lecture here: Petra Blaisse.

Funnily there is a connection point of Petra Blaisse and Rem Koolhaas. Petra Blaisse worked in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. There has been another collaboration between architecture and textile in the past: the collaboration between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Looking up the spectre of those collaborations gives valuable insights of the use of textile in architecture, use and meaning of materials in architecture and shows the performative potential of the textile medium in space.

Electroluminescent wire (often abbreviated to EL wire) is a thin copper wire coated in a phosphor which glows when an alternating current is applied to it. wikipedia
Certainly the quality of EL wire is unlike other light sources like LED ( a series of points) – it produces a smooth unbroken line of visible light. Its thin diameter makes it flexible and ideal for use in a variety of applications such as clothing or costumes – which makes it very interesting for me to use it in my weaving practice.

Loop.pH is a London based art and design studio intervening at an urban scale to re-imagine life in the city. Rachel Wingfield set up loop.pH to develop reactive surfaces for the interior and has worked on architectural and fashion commissions, product design and public installations. Rachel Wingfield was as well a speaker at the Enmeshed: Architecture and Textiles Conference in Stockholm last year.
They experiment in many fields of electroluminescence materials.

The work of Loop.ph inspires me a lot, since they put their work in the context of urban spaces and their interaction. Their work is settled in between research, art and design practice, creating works that will define our future way of living – not only seen fro the use of new materials and techniques, morelikely from the side of a sustainable point of view. (read further MetabolicCity.

From a textile design point of view, the EL-wire poses a wider understanding of the use of light and textiles. Several esthetical functions can be of interest when working with the EL-wire: light as a design element (interior patterns), light as a communicative element (warning systems), light as a lighting element (light object), … . Aspects that I am aware of when making testweavings with the EL-wire on my table loom.

Another workshop session of the Soft Technology series at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen / Norway, the write about it at the Future Textile Homepage:
- a working session drawing on the experience and knowledge of the participants. We will experiment with muscle wire/shape memory alloys (SMA) in textiles. Soft Technology is initiated by Hillevi Munthe and is a collaboration between Atelier Nord and ”Future Textiles” at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. The project is funded by The Arts Council of Norway, Nordic Culture Fund and Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts.

Shape memory alloys are metalthreads/wires that can “remember” a given shape. When cold, the wire is relaxes and flexible. When heated to a certain temperature by water, air or electricity, it contracts to the formed shape. Reference: you tube .

The picture above shows a work by Philip Beesley, who is an architect working with the idea of an architecture of geotextiles.
I can really recommend checking out his work, that is certainly contributing to the theme of architextiles. He produces installations using leading-edge technology like the newest materials and materialtechnology, interactive textiles and reflexive and responsive membranes, combined with canvases of interactive systems.
The work Hylozoic Soil / picture above, composed of many repeated units of laser cut plexiglass, with arduino’s powering reactive muscle wire limbs covered inethereal mylar feathers, with some hyper-dermic needles throne in to add that menacing feeling. // text taken from blog n-e-r-v-o-u-s.

My studio with workshop for electronic textiles is now operative. I am equipped with all tools, materials, electronic hard and software, fibers and yarns necessary to create interactive environments, objects and Installations. Weaving chair and spinning wheel help me to combine optic fiber, el wire / light cable, conductive yarns, different kinds of fibers (natural, synthetic, animal, metal ) into electronic textiles, that can carry light and sound. Follow my work via blog, or pay a visit when you are around! Welcome!

I will be joining an international conference exploring the relationship between architecture and textiles in contemporary design practice. September 24-25, Konstfack, Stockholm. Visit the homepage. The picture shows the book, Textile Architecture by Sylvie Krüger, she will be a speaker at the conference.

Enmeshed: Architecture and Textiles in Contemporary Design Practice, is a multidisciplinary conference exploring the relationship between textiles and textile technology and contemporary architecture and design. Practitioners from textile design, architecture, and interior design, as well as related historians and theoreticians will converge to present perspectives on this topic with the goal of expanding our understanding of the connections between architecture and textiles.

Confirmed speakers include Petra Blaisse (director, Inside Outside, Amsterdam), Patricia Gruits (Kennedy & Violich, Boston), Sylvie Krüger (author, Textile Architecture, 2009), Ulrika Mårtensson, Architect and Textile Designer (Stockholm), Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (CITA/Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, Copenhagen), David Serero (Serero Architectes, Paris), Rachel Wingfield (Loop.pH and Textile Futures Research Group, UK), and Susan Yelavich (Parsons, New York).

I recently purchased the book Textile Architecture and by being aware about the connection of body and mind when operating with interactivity in my art practice, this book poses a good connection point. Facts about the history of textiles being used in architecture (Bauhaus, Mies von der Rohe, Japanese Houses), materiality and geometric processes of transformation (to use textile techniques in architecture) are a good contribution to the challenge in my project. Different than from our culture of living the eastern civilization has a harmonic embedded understanding of the mind and the body, I think that the genre Architextiles is the last puzzle to the quest of mankind to the nomadism of the body // Toyo Ito, and a good way of how to embed our embodied mind into built architecture.

3D weavings, – project from 2001, Berlin.

I constructed little weaving models, where I used metal for the weft that and a flexible black colored cotton yarn for the chain. Because of the metal elements, such as bands, spirals and so on, which I found on a scrap yard, the woven fabric gets somehow stable and flexible. It can be transformed from the 2D surface into a 3D object. This technique of weaving, with a stable forming element as a weft, can be used for creating architecture. The walls get a new shape, creating a new type of facades, thus new spaces.
I brought the textile weaving technique into another context for building up architectural spaces, trying to create a new modern language of spaces for the needs of today.

Future Textiles project with Création Baumann and UDK, Berlin, Bern 2000

Aim was a the production of functional textiles and the conception of a collection, that coherent either reflection, acoustic or technical optic. Creation Baumann supplied innovative yarns, like holographic yarns, reflective-, thin lightweight metal-, paper- and other hybrid and synthetic yarns. Aim was to create a collection of textiles, that can be used in modern architecture.

It was an intense and fantastic project. An international selected team of students from Germany and Lithuania joined that project, and we learned how to weave with innovative very thin yarn, that is used for mass production of textiles. additional courses of how to experiment with yarn, to manipulate, destroy, paint / Color Stream Pigments from Merck AG, print etc with it – and to color yarn, was helping to create a collection.

We visited Creation Baumann, and innovative other companies in switzerland, that produce garn and textiles / Schöller Textiles, carpets / Ruckstuhl and embroidery / F. Rohner in StGallen. Ruckstuhl is worldwide known for its production of environmetal friendly carpets and Rohner for its outstanding and stunning high class quality embroidery that is seen on Haute Couture all over the world, f ex Christian Dior.

My collection:
Polysight Reflection textiles are transparent and semitransparent fabrics, that deal with the topic of reflection, transparency and visibility. The weavings have changing effects in color, reflection and transparency. I used polyester mono filaments, metal, plastic, holographic and light reflecting yarns as well as wool. Depending on the point of view and the time of day, the textiles have a different look. They appear like a semitransparent colored fabric or as a transparent light fabric. The use of the fabric is for modern architecture, with its huge glass facades and the cold appearance of concrete. Its function lays in to regulate the sun´s impact into the building, to cool down the room climate, and to regulate the working privacy of the inside for outside viewers. In the evening the textiles turns transparent and the building opens up to the outside. The textile can be used as window panels, room dividers or curtains.

From 1st till 4th of June, Diffus Design holds a four-day worklab at Atelier Nord. Diffus is a design company, working with theoretical and practical approach towards art, design, architecture and new media. Recent work of Diffus is the LED-Powered Climate Dress that monitors pollution.

Read my rapport about the worklab at the Future Textile Blog.