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Encoding Matter

🇧🇪 · FoAM

Turning to the underside of worked form; on pattern, threshold, and what gets through. A new cluster of pages from the Anarchive 's Silver Reader. Foglets flash and fall; a curtain of tiny, mobile, force-bearing machines pretending, badly, to be nothing at all. The room turns viscous, catches on itself, forgetting the surfaces promised by its grip. The old dream: matter made answerable, speck-by-speck. In 1991, the “pixels” were computational cells in a fine-grained simulation. By the 2000s, the analogy had shifted: what if pixels were volumetric, tactile, adhesive, mobile, material? What shows is the labour. The underside of repeatable form is where abandoned futures snag – a residue of waylaid forms. A soft interface worn close against the skin, learning you by heart. Communication requires an apparatus, but not because matter is silent. Chalk marks, scuffed, on loom beams and a mason’s loft floor. Membranes and Meshwork The dream says every encoding is a grid of addresses. The loom half-agrees – a grid, certainly, but one threaded under tension, its counterweight set and reset, learned by the thread about to go. The Jacquard Mistake Past the loom the grid stutters: a groove, a callused grip, rings in a cut stump – repetitions made readable. The same chalk line, drawn and redrawn, carries enough of the rule to let the next mark differ. Tilt the chamber, move the growlight, and the root traces a woven path of its own – gravity and light for warp and weft, the loom returning as something grown. Pattern Thinking Across Domains , Terracing With Spectres Crafting at the Threshold of Knowing In Qing workshops a gourd was grown inside a carved mould; the mould set the limit, growth found the form, and though the mould was one, no two gourds came out alike. The pattern returns changed. Each encoding captures one difference, discarding the rest. Designing (for and with) Living Systems Edible Alchemy

What future for textiles?

🇧🇪 · FoAM

Tilt the vessel and the roots redirect. Modulate the light, the pattern changes. The technique is simple; what grows from it is anything but. Carole Collet spent over a decade learning to work at the pace of a cactus, aerial roots, mycelium – treating garden and grow-tank as studio, plant and fungus as collaborators. "Designing (for and with) Living Systems" gathers fifteen years of this inquiry: botanical studies, speculative provocations, slow-manufactured objects. Learning the plant's terms, then bending them. https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/designing_living_systems/ A different material, a different decade, the same question in a different key. Move the body and the light redirects. "Membranes and Meshworks" compiles twenty-five years of work at the intersection between textiles and (wearable) computing. Costumes teaching bodies how to move before the wearers knew it was happening; collaborators building materials that sense and answer back in real time. https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/membranes_and_meshwork/ Brussels, 2005: Joanna Berzowska asks a room of people trying to work out what these new, active materials are actually for: "Who are the actors, what is the stage, where does the activity happen?" She speaks of electroluminescent wires and soft circuits, not fungus, but her questions hold. Who initiates the change? Neither of these texts supplies a single answer. Instead, they keep answering: different answers, different timescales – split-second responses, then nine years of cactus fur. Another answer, smaller and stranger: "Edible Alchemy", Collet's work with Bartaku on flax, aronia and edible photovoltaics; a tendril a dedicated post would have severed – pigment, current, and taste meeting, for a moment, on someone's tongue. https://anarchive.fo.am/green/edible_alchemy/