Touching Stories
How Textiles Tell Stories Through Their Haptics
Description
The textile installation “Touching Stories” explores the relationship between textiles, haptics and digitality. The resulting textiles (mainly knits) tell the stories of five female characters – Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Stacy Horn, Rosalind Picard and the figure of Cyborg. Their stories provide a picture of the complex history(s) of the development of digital technologies. The textiles invite visitors to touch them – they can be interacted with while sitting, lying or standing. This creates moments of connection between the life stories and different haptic and tactile experiences. A VR animation of a 3D-scanned knitted fabric, which I have assigned to the figure of the cyborg, opens the space into the virtual and allows the viewer to participate in the moment of translation of a textile between analogue and digital. Using textiles, a historical contextualisation of digital technologies is achieved from a feminist critical perspective.