Ancient Futures | Open Studio
Saturday, December 10, 2022
12–4pm ET
Free / Donate
CultureHub NYC
47 Great Jones Street
3rd Fl
New York, NY 10012
Join CultureHub Resident Artist Nicole Yi Messier and collaborator Victoria Manganiello in an open studio showcasing ‘Ancient Futures’, a multi-layered woven textile whose surface visually fluctuates based on the sentiment analysis of visitors’ shared secrets.
In addition to the participatory textile installation, the open studio will also display weavings created during workshops at CultureHub and large and small scale prototypes and swatches that provide visitors an insight into the production and process of weaving with fiber optics and etextiles. The open studios will provide the community with an opportunity to help Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello to workshop and explore the storytelling potentials of “Ancient Futures”. Swatch-making, experimentation and audience engagement are essential aspects of their creative, collaborative process.
RSVP is encouraged but not required to attend this event.
This event is supported by the CultureHub Residency Program.
More about Ancient Futures:
Ancient Futures is a participatory media installation capturing sonic textures and creating an evolving fabric of soundscapes. This textile is created with soft electronics to collect, store and cumulatively visualize solicited secrets from viewers using long term data-textile storage.
Ancient Incans used Quipu to document economic and civil data. Enslaved people created a system of railroad quilts as they traversed the Antebellum Southern USA. During WWII, women knit secret war strategies into the sweaters of spies. Technical methods in weaving, knitting, sewing, etc. are able to hide and deliver sensitive details and encode important messages with a visual language that all humans are intimately familiar with: textile.
Artists Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello are creating a current, modern precedent in this textile tradition: Ancient Futures is a connection to the past and the future. Visitors are invited to interact with the kinetic textile and participate in adding their sonic messages to this evolving textile.
Image by Marie-Luise Skibbe.