eTextiles: Into the Matrix
Intro to work-in-progress (based off talk given at eTextiles Spring Break, Prairie Ronde Residency, Vicksburg, MI, October 2022)
The phrase electronic textiles, or eTextiles for short, burst into the literature of electronics, engineering, art, fashion, and design in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It has come to mean a variety of things over the last twenty years, from artist’s use of computers in the aid of fabric design to the design of interactive pliable objects to and most notably, wearables, in fashion or design and, then, naturally art, where the end goal of utility plays little role. A consensus shared amongst most all these object forms is the integration of conductive elements into or as a pliable material.
One problem with eTextiles is that the term’s definition lacks specificity. This problem generates not so much from users of electronic textiles, as from the intriguing complexity of a textile itself. A textile is a nonspecific material with a wide range of applicable technologies or processes by which one can design its form and feel. Since the late 1990s, a freneticism around technology, part of which is inherent in new design research but also, in the context of Silicon Valley, induced by new market mentality, has made electronic textiles difficult to situate: from electronic blankets to electronic monitoring bracelets, eTextiles traverse a wide range of spaces where they function disparately.
A certain amorphousness of eTextiles also derives from an imposter syndrome inherited by some textile designers and artists in a century-long status battle with modern art and masculine industrial design. Never before in scholarly literature has there been such a tic-like need to introduce modern and contemporary textiles as an ancient craft. Such far-reaching and cursory introductions speak to an attempt to legitimize 20th c. textiles and raise the stakes of their practice in light of their historically inferior position in modern and contemporary art museums, canonical art history texts and at auction houses. This comes at an especially interesting moment in textile’s relatively new collision with electronics, where technology, for some, acts compensatory, making up for something textiles are perceived to lack. For example, the British designer Elaine Ng Yan Ling, explains: “weaving is a traditional craft skill, but needs to be updated, which is why I have a weave element within all my work.” If the desire to update textiles drives one’s work, a better understanding of what textiles are is entirely lost. To upgrade them is to miss the point or be incognizant of their technological prowess.
The issue of specificity is a productive problem, which I use to make sense of the field of electronic textiles. In this essay, I think about the definition of a textile in three ways: 1) as a form of technology (weaving on its own terms is a technology) 2) as a pliant and unfixed form and 3) as something that has traditionally had a very palpable but mutable materiality.