Arts Thread

Unwoven Memories is a project translating memories of objects from Colonia Guel, a town in Catalonia, Spain, into a new form of ‘language’ - coded woven textile. Stories and information of 260 objects from 26 areas around the town (personal spaces, public spaces, etc.) were studied and translated into binary numbers. Each object was asked 15 ‘binary’ questions’ representing 15 properties of that object. Physical properties include small/big - 0/1; smooth/rough - 0/1; etc. Emotional/Cultural/Functional properties include yes/no - 0/1 questions: ‘Does it hold a significant memory to someone?’ ‘Is it essential for the daily life of people?’; etc. Each area is represented with 10 objects to make up a matrix table of 0 and 1, from here a new weaving pattern is designed by assigning ‘0’ as a type of knot and ‘1’ as another type. In the end results in 26 woven textiles capturing the memories of 260 objects from 26 areas of Colonia Guel. And together, they are connected in a tapestry of the collective memories from Colonia Guel. With the audiovisual experiences of projected light, the tapestry demonstrates the essence of life, of memories flowing through everything surrounding us that we simply cannot see. This project doesn’t stop there but takes another step to demonstrate this methodology can translate objects/places’ memories into different types of media or ‘languages’ and in this case, new typography. The same matrix tables of 0 and 1 are put in Javascript to animate a line connecting all the number 1s of the table. Whenever a shape of an English character appears, it is used as a base structure and later woven with a visual ‘thread’ to generate a new typography design, in a way containing the memories of 10 objects from that area’s matrix table.