2015
Proposal for Loop Link Transit Bus Shelter for City of Chicago
In our almost totally digitally infused and organized society, the only evidence of the human is the touch. The presence of the individual is the presence of the mishap the glitch in the system or the error of the hand. There is expression in; the line ruled through computer software, the gravity bound hand-scribing graphite onto paper or the printers’ ink pressed into the weave of a cloth. Yet the gesture or the signature of the mortal hand is what connects us most profoundly to our past and future.
A moiré pattern is a visual byproduct caused by overlaying two identical patterns such as grids or dots. These patterns are often seen as accidental nuisances in the printing field but their effect is unpredictable and visually dynamic. I created a series of moiré patterns by screen printing these ordered lined patterns onto textiles, by hand. The disruptions in the printed patterns are like glitchy drawings that defy the two dimensional boundaries of the plane of cloth, to become spatially dynamic volumes of pattern and line. The hand screen printed fabrics were then digitized and recomposed to create the suite of four artworks for the Loop Link.
Chicago is a new city founded on trade, transportation and commerce. Like so many of its sister cities that rose out of the 19th century, Chicago was built on older forms of production that were traded in the great “pit” of exchange. Commodities and their modes of exchange have both rapidly evolved from that of the brick and mortar to that of the digital and cyber. Our new civic energy often is tied to the accelerating speed and precision offered by the digital. Through dynamic sets of spatial patterns, MOIRÉ explores the complex ecology of Chicago’s evolving political, cultural and economic histories.
The interplay between the hand and the digital, and the textile and the city allow us to contemplate scales of engagement along a spectrum of the personal, the civic and the global. MOIRÉ fully acknowledges the necessity of the digital within contemporary society yet offers an introduction of the glitch as a tool for regenerating a poetics of space.