Nathalie Gebert

Nathalie Gebert
Germany


Nathalie Gebert works as an artist and designer in the fields of new media, art, and feminist theory. Her installations and research engage, reimagine, and reenact the relationships between technologies, non-human life, and techno-feminism. Using experimental methods, she reinvents ways of inter- and intraspecific communication and explores the individual properties, history, and potential of materials. Her works materialize into compositions of fragile and solid elements. As co-editor of the publication HREF ZINE, she participates in a collaborative knowledge production as well as the exploration of cultural knowledge and opens conversations about environmental, philosophical, artistic, and sociopolitical issues and their underlying their interconnections.

On Framing Textile Ambiguities

White cotton thread, black ink, Arduino Nano, stepper motors, custom electronics, custom brass and metal framing, custom 3D printed parts, custom steel stands

Variable size

2019-2020


The installation On Framing Textile Ambiguities is the output of a critical investigation on social and technical developments that led to the current local technological situation. Beyond being a metaphor for the theoretical framework of Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledges, the thread that wanders through the installation reminds of the history of digital communication media and computer arts with an emphasis on the interconnectedness with the history of textile production. Central to this investigation was the local and material basis and bounding, that everyone, everything and every medium has. This inevitable materiality has been described by Haraway as an important part of knowledge production.
As one of the oldest techniques of humanity, the history of textile processing was brought forth by non-western societies and distributed globally, bearing emancipatory potentials and oppressive capitalist structures alike. The thread can be acknowledged as a contradictory and ambiguous material, carrying both, aesthetic and practical qualities. The punch card system of the Jacquard loom(1805 A.D.) embraced the further development of universal automatized processes, manifesting the entanglement of computer science with the inherently algorithm-based techniques of textile processing. Woven grid-based patterns suggest the subsequent development of pixel-based images. As a series of machines, the installation presents itself as a group. They share the same thread and are made from the same components. Each machine is built around a frame, through which the thread is running. Though they are finding various meanings in the encoding due to differences in the widths of the frames.

On Framing Textile Ambiguities

White cotton thread, black ink, Arduino Nano, stepper motors, custom electronics, custom brass and metal framing, custom 3D printed parts, custom steel stands

Variable size

2019-2020


The installation On Framing Textile Ambiguities is the output of a critical investigation on social and technical developments that led to the current local technological situation. Beyond being a metaphor for the theoretical framework of Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledges, the thread that wanders through the installation reminds of the history of digital communication media and computer arts with an emphasis on the interconnectedness with the history of textile production. Central to this investigation was the local and material basis and bounding, that everyone, everything and every medium has. This inevitable materiality has been described by Haraway as an important part of knowledge production.
As one of the oldest techniques of humanity, the history of textile processing was brought forth by non-western societies and distributed globally, bearing emancipatory potentials and oppressive capitalist structures alike. The thread can be acknowledged as a contradictory and ambiguous material, carrying both, aesthetic and practical qualities. The punch card system of the Jacquard loom(1805 A.D.) embraced the further development of universal automatized processes, manifesting the entanglement of computer science with the inherently algorithm-based techniques of textile processing. Woven grid-based patterns suggest the subsequent development of pixel-based images. As a series of machines, the installation presents itself as a group. They share the same thread and are made from the same components. Each machine is built around a frame, through which the thread is running. Though they are finding various meanings in the encoding due to differences in the widths of the frames.

On Framing Textile Ambiguities

White cotton thread, black ink, Arduino Nano, stepper motors, custom electronics, custom brass and metal framing, custom 3D printed parts, custom steel stands

Variable size

2019-2020


The installation On Framing Textile Ambiguities is the output of a critical investigation on social and technical developments that led to the current local technological situation. Beyond being a metaphor for the theoretical framework of Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledges, the thread that wanders through the installation reminds of the history of digital communication media and computer arts with an emphasis on the interconnectedness with the history of textile production. Central to this investigation was the local and material basis and bounding, that everyone, everything and every medium has. This inevitable materiality has been described by Haraway as an important part of knowledge production.
As one of the oldest techniques of humanity, the history of textile processing was brought forth by non-western societies and distributed globally, bearing emancipatory potentials and oppressive capitalist structures alike. The thread can be acknowledged as a contradictory and ambiguous material, carrying both, aesthetic and practical qualities. The punch card system of the Jacquard loom(1805 A.D.) embraced the further development of universal automatized processes, manifesting the entanglement of computer science with the inherently algorithm-based techniques of textile processing. Woven grid-based patterns suggest the subsequent development of pixel-based images. As a series of machines, the installation presents itself as a group. They share the same thread and are made from the same components. Each machine is built around a frame, through which the thread is running. Though they are finding various meanings in the encoding due to differences in the widths of the frames.

 

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