Glitched Textiles

12/02/18

A visual glitch is a product of an error that usually is caused by a mistranslation because of loss or a breakdown in a digital communication or device. These errors can reveal the language of a digital image. Materializing digital pixels enables us to explore different ways to translate digital tools into a palpable textile surface. This also shows us how digital and ancestral techniques can be intimately connected.

Ikats ressemble to digital glitchy images by their vibrant colors and patterns which look like they have been being 'stretched' or compressed. This is due to the way Ikats are made since you dye the pattern directly on the wrap with a resist dye technique. This delicate operation that goes from bonding, dying and finally setting up the wrap on the loom which creates small irregularities as if the pattern is shifting or bleeding out giving a vibration to the pattern. The pattern is created on the folded warp with a reflective symmetry technique. I started to use the same technique for knitting by dying my yarn so that just with a simple stitch it could create a pattern. Digital glitches look quite similar to me with Ikat textiles. Adding to that, the process of erasing or moving the ASCII data of a picture in order to create a distortion, is also similar to when you slightly shift your dyed yarn on your knitting machine. Each time it then recreates a new pattern.

Traditional Ikat weavings from central asia (Uzékistan).

In the way these traditional African woven Kent cloth from Togo are constructed, it immediatly stikes out how glitch images are made. Indeed the weavers stretch and compress a chosen pattern on the entire surface. This because when it is worn over the shoulder, the stretched part comes on the length of the body and the compressed part near the face. The visual scaling creates a optical sensation as when you meet someone your eye does “saccadic movements” on the face and then a lighter glance at the body. In mathematics the term for this pattern scaling is called “contractive affine transformation“.

Source: African Fractals, Ron Eglash

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