A Table weaving
december 2023
A Table Weaving is a community-based collaborative project (collaborators include: Laura Devendorf, Jacqueline Wernimont, Steven Frost) that creates space to make sense of and meditate upon the energy and physical infrastructures required to power the “cloud”. Community members will be invited to join the space and encode data into cloth via weaving while listening to an ambisonic soundscape. My contribution to the project is sound and sound design. Ambisonic is an ideal method for presenting sound because it allows the listener to be consistently enveloped by sound moving around the 40.4 system in the B2. This enrapture is significant in mirroring both the weaving thread, consistently unraveling and raveling back into the woven tapestry, and the consistent yet circular movement of the body in the practice of weaving itself. The unique way ambisonics are routed corresponds to the speculative form of data encoding and the weaving technique used. Ambisonics is a form of multichannel routing in which its transmission channels do not carry speaker signals; instead, sound is sent to several speakers, leaving trails of sound that create the aural perception of movement. The illusion of movement here relates directly to the floats, which, in weaving, are threads that are not woven into the warp. Each of the three looms incorporated floats, most obviously in the first loom (pictured to the left). The floats are noted by the trails of cotton thread hanging above the warp, which indicates speculative or unknown components of energy use data. Despite being unattached, they create the illusion of moving towards the end of the textile piece and closing the weft row. This mirrors the way that trails echo, reverb, shift volume, and pan create the illusion of movement throughout the space.
Community weaving documentation
The soundscape itself comprises two components: field recordings of two looms and electronic sounds derived from data sonification. The field recordings were added to create moments of connection and synthesis between the sound and the weaving within the space. The recordings were taken of my own weaving on a tapestry loom and of Kathryn Walters using the jacquard loom. The jacquard loom is also a deafening machine, where the HVAC system used to lift the heddles sounds intense and loud enough to mirror that of energy centers. The way that the data was encoded into sound by taking a 2016 data set of consumption by population in every city across the United States and transcribing it into electronic music notes. I wanted to highlight within the sound the presence of cities with lower populations and, therefore, lower energy consumption. Typically, these would correlate with lower numbers and lower electronic music notes, yielding less aural contrast and emphasis; to highlight them, I inverted them to produce higher notes. The instrumentation mapped onto the electronic notes focused primarily on stringed instruments because of the looms' visual and user similarities. The translation of sound helps to perceive and understand the valance and vastness of data and energy consumption across the United States in a more embodied and sensorial way.
images from final weaving
more info about the project can be found here