E-textiles have the potential to blend audio-visual elements, performatively or not. A project called Interwoven Sound Spaces (ISS) is using e-textiles in telematic performance (a performance with two or more performers in two or more locations). This is usually done through screens and audio output devices but ISS has incorporated these existing technologies with “interactive wearables”.
The team behind the project collaborated with musicians by providing them with a range of technologies and letting them use them as a composition tool, “enabling physical touch and expressive body-based interaction between performer and computational audio systems.” (Visi, F. 55). By embedding conductive materials into stretchy fabric through weaving and knitting the musicians’ stretch and details of their movement could be decoded and used as a compositional input. Another way ISS have reimagined telematic performance is by sending output from an instrument in location A to an instrument in location B using speakers. Musician Cat Hope created software for interactive graphical score generation through movement using e-textiles
The relationship between body movement and technology has been increasingly interesting to me throughout this project. The way ISS portrays these relationships, creating something new with many possibilities for performance inspires me. Being in the later stages of making an interactive E-textile I am starting to consider possibilities for my work to be interacted with by an audience.
References:
Visi, F. et al. (2024) ‘Networking concert halls, musicians, and interactive textiles: Interwoven Sound Spaces’, Digital Creativity, 35(1), pp. 52–73.