Thursday, May 20, 2010

Music from fabric: fabricmachine

This is an art installation that is also a musical creation. From the artists website:

Installation and performative Instrument: Two fabric loops, driven by a motor, create a division in space. Light sensors measure the opacity of the textile;
The way all pieces are sewed together for a fabric sound track is responsible for beats, breaks and rhythms. It makes your individual clothing hearable. without any special effects


So in other words, this installation/instrument converts the information on a piece of fabric into digitized instructions for sounds. I've certainly never heard of fabric being used as a basis for music, so this is really fantastic.

That being said, I wonder if there's more that you could do with this. If it truly is the case that opacity is the only thing being measured, then there seems to be lots of information in a piece of fabric that is lost. Colour for example, will only matter in terms of its capacity to let light through - much in the same way that colour reacts to a black & white photocopier: it get's mostly lost, although the shades are still there.

Other aspects of a piece of fabric, such as shape, weave, and even smell are lost in this current installation. I wonder how these things could be incorporated? You would need a different way of scanning the fabric obviously... hmmm!

Don't get me wrong, these aren't criticisms. I would never have thought of fabric in this way, and I think it's really cool that the fabricmachine is doing something new. Instead, these "criticisms" are the possibilities that this installation has opened my eyes to, and I think it's absolutely great!

fabricmachine, by Kathrin Stumreich

fabricmachine from Kathrin Stumreich on Vimeo.

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