On one visit, I overheard a visitor complaining aloud to her companion: “What’s this, a furniture store?” On another, a man badgered me for carrying my newborn. His monologue went something like this “babies need freedom of movement! Especially boys! He should be in a stroller.” By the end of the tirade he specified he never had children (as if it was not already obvious). My friend, a more experienced mom, waved him away. Not the dialogue the curators hoped for, but the longest impromptu interaction I’ve observed in this gallery.

The mansplainer did help me understand why this exhibition felt off. The chairs incontestably draw attention to materials and the crafting process. But I expected more from an exhibition aiming to spark conversations. Know which chairs are talked about, generate debates about “sustainability, identity and history”, to quote the museum’s description? Wheelchairs and strollers and the space that should be dedicated to them. Parents carrying babies. Public benches in parks and stations. Patios encroaching on what used to be parking space.

Now there’s nothing wrong in curating an exhibition of pieces by designers pushing the boundaries of what’s considered design or craft, where form follows technique rather than function. But framing them as design prioritizing meaning over function makes me cringe. Meaning for whom? Our everyday chairs have meaning. They tell rich stories about our identities. They are adorned, chosen under different types of constraints. And speaking of babies: strollers (or push chairs!) denote social class and style of parenting.

If this is about the chair as a motif in artistic practices, why are they not exhibited as pieces of art?  

Now I don’t particularly want to replay the  art and craft debates, though it is hard to ignore them in this case. Showcasing only high end pieces, without any context on the roles of chairs, and overall very little context on contemporary design professionals practices just seems like a waste of an opportunity. Maybe especially since Professor Galen Cranz, the design historian who’s written extensively about the history of chairs, the role of chairs in the development of design practice and the cultures of sitting, teaches nearby in Berkeley.

It is however a good example of the uneasy place of design in modern and contemporary arts museums.

Design and crafts were long ignored by art museums or the domain of museums focused on crafts or applied arts. You’ll now find them, sometimes squeezed in separate rooms next to art focused display, sometimes as temporary exhibitions, often in museum stores funnelling visitors into buying the kind of design museum goers appreciate. More rarely, they’re exhibited alongside artworks, echoing themes, periods, or testifying to artists’ excursion into that realm.

I was struck recently by a chair exhibited at the Quai Branly, in Paris. Their Songlines exhibition, aiming to preserve and transmit the Aborigen Songline of the Seven Sisters, closes on an adorned wheelchair wrapped in yarn and vegetable fibres, testifying to the lifelong work of art making in their culture. There’s much to say about the design of this wheelchair - the “only chair design that changed the world”. Here’s to hoping for design exhibition moving the needle on how to talk about design.

We prompted Stable Diffusion for images of dreams dreamt by generative models. We took a slice of one of our favourite image into a knitted tapestry with the ultimate goal to create an immersive installation. Some see a face. We see a city in the clouds and a skyline beaming in the night sky. What do you see?

Over three hours we manually knitted one row at a time, bringing the AI’s dream into the world, and resulting in a two meters long piece of fabric.

It will soon be showcased at Pebblebed.

Please subscribe for more posts on fiber arts and technologies and our generative AI for textile projects!

Inscrivez-vous maintenant

This publication started as a collaboration between two San Francisco-based academics, an AI, and the practice of making a quilt.

In putting together our first project, we were interested in exploring the overlaps and intersections that can be discovered by connecting emerging high tech tools with fiber art practices that are often framed as feminized domestic crafts. Machinery has long played an instrumental role in textile making, from Jacquard looms to knitting and sewing machines. These practices set the stage for much of modern computing and programming; in the early 19th century, female workers used punch cards to weave complex textile patterns with the jacquard loom, which inspired people like Charles Babbage and led to more modern computing hardware and programming. 

This publication explores the questions that have come out of this collaboration while sharing different processes of making. We’re interested in exploring what inspirations and ideas can be sparked when textile makers interact with AI, almost "à la Oulipo" – textile making with constraints. As we stitch together different technologies and creative practices in surprising ways, we hope this can open up new questions about the relations between digital technologies, human sociality, and traditional textile practices.

Subscribe now