Digital complexity is turned into the comforts of home in this new series by artist Phillip Stearns, which offers up for sale pillows, tapestries, and other cozy objects woven from textiles that reflect computational processes. Computational Textiles features dynamic fabrics that come in all sorts of warping and pixelated patterns; rather than imagined through sketches or other hand-drawn prototypes, these designs and forms were all created in code Stearns wrote and then woven together by a computerized Jacquard loom. The results technically relay data, although they appear as simple geometric patterns or even dreamy, painterly compositions.
Stearns has been making textiles inspired by the digital world for a number of years: In 2012 he founded Glitch Textiles, which wove images of digital malfunctions compiled from his Year of the Glitch project. This newest series looks more broadly at computer algorithms for inspiration, making visible the systems that typically operate unseen.
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