Stitching Worlds: Exploring Textiles and Electronics
This text aims to reflect on the book ‘Stitching Worlds: exploring Textiles and Electronics’ edited by Ebru Kurbak, and contributions by a stellar team of writers, thinkers, and textile practitioners.
The book is the written outcome of the art-based research project of the same name. The research explores a speculative scenario where the materials involved in consumer electronics production belong to the textile realm. Between 2014 and 2018, the team created artefacts and installations that offer critical comments on how we relate to technologies and how they are produced. Ebru Kurbak, the principal investigator and project leader, stresses that ‘Stitching worlds’ is an art project. She says that the intentions behind the project are what places it in the art field. This approach contradicts the utilitarian and unbiased processes the tech industry has been taking while forcing technologies down our throats. In this research, the goal is not profit, but “the defining criteria can be set on values.” The researchers propose a critical reflection on technologies through the craft of a new technological object. This process highlights skills, contexts, and actors that seem misplaced initially but make a lot of sense in the proposed imaginary past.
Irene Posch, the key researcher and contributor to this book, showed the crossover…