A Table Weaving – Unstable Design Lab

Documentation and sound by Brook Vann

A Table Weaving is a collaborative project that creates space to make sense of and meditate upon the energy and physical infrastructures required to power the “cloud”. Community members were invited to join the space and encode data into cloth via weaving while listening to an ambisonic soundscape. The event ended with a public celebration where we invited audience members to join us in finishing and unveiling the tapestries created during the community weaving for discussion.

Setting up the installation for a Table Weaving, open Dec 6-8 2023 for community participation.

Community members were invited to follow lift plans that specified the number of repeats based on the values in the data set.

Participants came though the space for 2 days and spend about a hour on the looms translating the patterns into cloth.

At the final closing event, we cut off and revealed the cloth. The piece in the foreground encodes data about the total size of data stored on the cloud from 2010 and projected into 2025.

Collaborators

Laura Devendorf (she/her)

Laura Devendorf is an assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder where she works and teaches at the intersection of engineering and critical design. She directs the Unstable Design Lab, where she works closely with artists, students, and researchers to develop both provocations and software for textiles design.

Jacqueline Wernimont (she/her)

Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. As a digital media scholar who specializes in mathematic and computational media and their histories, her work includes creative-critical making of multisensory immersive works which she describes as data visceralization.

Steven Frost (they/them)

Steven Frost (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at CU Boulder and an interdisciplinary fiber artist. Their research focuses on textiles, queer studies, pop culture, and community development in public spaces.

Brook Vann (they/them)

Brook is a new media artist based in Boulder, Colorado. Brook explores gender and queerness in their work through motion-capture, sound design and data analysis. They use these various technologies to better understand the abundant and subtle translations between body, space and movement and how they affect gender performance. They have received an MFA in the Kinetic Imaging department at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021.

Support

This work was made possible through the B2 Creative Residency Program and Dartmouth’s Digital Justice Lab.