Melissa Coleman developed a series of beautiful interactive textiles during her artist-in-residency at V2_. Her project titled Media VIntage was inspired by an article by Bruce Sterling in The Book of Imaginary Media, in which he points out that new media become obsolete faster than old ones.
Being an avid Bruce Sterling fan myself, I couldn’t help but fall in love with her project. Coleman created a series of interactive electronic textiles that are woven with memories. My personal favorite is Bravo a tapestry that invites viewers to interact with the embroidered conductive Braille and, as viewer’s fingers pass over the Braille, a song from the past is played.
Another variation uses displays the lyrics on an LCD screen. From her site: “Media Vintage is critical of the storage of digital data in black boxes, which become inaccessible shortly after another storage medium becomes the norm. It remembers a time when technology was built to last and tries to imagine how digital data storage could be visual, physical and meaningful. In Media Vintage, digital information is physically stored in textiles and read through interaction. The textiles make digital data, which is so abstract and fleeting, readable by both man and machine.”
To learn more about Coleman’s Media VIntage project, visit the V2_ website.
