6/11 — Week 4 — Patterns (Anni Albers)

1. Recapping homework/reading:

Homework group: Lisa, Norm, Avery, Tyler Reading quote:

Each text, however short, has its own 'reading time'. A poem only communicates if read slowly It is certainly wrong to read a poem quickly, as if it were a telegram

2. Lecture: patterns

When we're doing design, what is the role of pattern?

Artist 1: Bridget Riley (Image search) / Research doc

I work with nature, although in completey new terms

Often compositions involve very simple transformations. e.g. pinching a set of rectangles

Kind of like vision tests/optical illusions, you'll get uncomfortable

Frequency modulation — freq is getting longer from the bottom to top of the painting. Vera Molnár-esque, start with grid of triangles, add a slight curve to that.

There's a lot of planning that go into these, you'll see the drawing and the mathematics

Started with b/w, moved to color eventually

Artist 2: Odili Donald Odita

All visual materials are culturally grounded and it's important to realize wheere their meanings are derived from

The moment you turn on TV and you see static. There's no content, but what sort of connections can your brain make?

Nice color choices

Feels like it could be created with code, but almost impossible to know where to start. e.g. how to pick these colors

Artist 3: Anni Albers (Image results)

Photo in front of her loom

We do not speak of designing apicutre/concerto, only of house, city, bowl, fabric. But surely these can all be, like painting/music, works of art

Studied weaving, became a teacher at Bauhaus. Fled Nazi germany -> moved to America, later teaching @ Black Mountain College, growing textile arts

Really elegant work

Bauhaus 100 year anniversary last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4mK44rHpYo

A lot of work is taking a grid and breaking the grid. Exploring language and communication across it

Takes a longggg time. Albers only really has pieces in the # of dozens, instead of thousands like more "prolific" artists.

Lot of the work displayed is in the pre-work/planning/painting, not just textiles

Really reminds of Bridget Riley, like optical illusions

Typewriter patterns, typing the same character over and over again

How would you code somethingl ike this? have no idea! but it's an interesting space (over / under)

Computation + Knitting

Early history of computation, Jacquard Looms, one of the first computers, punch cards to program it.

Early versions of memory, woven wire thru magnets to store bits of memory. The materiality of computation.

Doti, modern rebuild of Jacquard Loom

Artist: Mariko Kosaka

Ahren Lee

Dataviz thru weaving

Womxn in STEM

tarngerine / rtp2020