textilelab   research

A hidden dialogue that takes place on fabric

This is a visual poetry project: a study about hiding messages, secrets and poems. It’s a project about taking time to discover a garment, a fabric, a person; a layered narrative. Methods I’m looking into are steganography and visual cryptography: using encryption and concealment. It gives a kind of tension to wear secret thoughts and frustrations on your skin; people have to make an effort to decipher those messages and that gives you a sense of vulnerable security.

One way of looking at this is as a project about communication between two people who know each other very well and how that communication can then be partially deciphered by others. It is about the contrast between personal communication - inside jokes, a shared symbol language - and external communication - how you present yourself, how you come across, but also what you choose to reveal about yourself. Another way is as wearing your own secrets on your sleeve, veiled one-way communication of messages that mean nothing at first glance.

Possibilities: technique overview

Translation into concept

input > process > output

It’s about slowing down, not just posting stuff for a millisecond of anyone’s attention and a like based on an extremely fast impression and judgement. Every detail has a meaning and if you look for it you may actually find it. A garment or fragment of a garment is hyperpersonalized, catered towards the wearer.

SYMBOLS

The symbols are empty vessels, blank canvases that can be assigned a desired meaning. The symbols can be the key to decipher encrypted texts.