PikselXX

Skogen is a collaborative project between Hillevi Munthe (NO) and Elisabeth Schimana (AT)

“The forest” is a spatial textile installation with incorporated electronics and metal wires with shape memory, so-called shape memory alloy (SMA) or muscle wire. The muscle wire creates programmed movement in the fabric.

In the gallery space, tubes of textile hang from ceiling to floor at regular intervals. They fill the room, but it is still possible to walk between them. The tubes are made of light, transparent silk partially felted with raw wool. The felted surfaces are knotty, bubbly and rough. At irregular intervals, the textile lifts up from the floor and stays there before slowly descending back towards the floor. The promise happens quickly, suddenly, while the denial is slow. It is as if the installation breathes and lives. As the audience moves through the installation, they wear headphones with a field recording from the forest at Druskininkai outside Vilnius recorded with specially built microphones.

Electronic textile

Muscle wire is a metal alloy of nickel and titanium that can switch between two states, activated by heating. When the metal wire is below a certain temperature, it is soft and flexible. At a certain temperature, it contracts to the shape it has been set to “remember” through a precise shaping process. By connecting it to an electronic circuit, I use resistance heat to activate the contraction and can program the intervals. The circuit is partly textile, partly made of traditional electronic components. I construct the textile components myself from conductive textile material. Incorporated into the textile, the muscle wire creates a fluid, organic movement that gives a surprisingly strong physical experience of the presence of something alive.

Textile
Felting silk and wool together (nunofelting) makes it possible to work with transparency/opacity and structure in the surface in a completely unique way. In the felting process, the wool shrinks by about 40 per cent, while the silk does not shrink. With a very thin layer of raw wool (untreated wool directly from the sheep), the felted parts will shrink to the maximum and give a structured surface with knots and bubbles. The process is rarely completely predictable. After the tubes are felted, they are dyed with plant colors from leaves, plants and mushrooms. The material’s own color helps to determine the result of the dyeing, so that it is not possible to have full control over the result here either.

Sound
The field recording is a displaced auditory memory from a concrete place. The sound recording from Druskininkai was made with a custom-built microphone: a mannequin head on a human-tall pole with the microphones placed near the ears. The sound has been recorded as a human would experience it, in a clear three-dimensional auditory space. In the recording of the forest’s deafening silence, you hear insects buzzing close by, frogs and the wind rustling in the trees. The silence of the forest is full of life.

Hillevi Munthe (NO) has worked with electronic textiles since 2009 on her practical research project on e-textile materials and techniques carried out in collaboration with the Bergen Academy of the Arts titled Soft Technology. “The forest” is a continuation of this work.

E-textiles have become increasingly well known in recent decades and describe both the incorporation of traditional electronics into textile materials and the construction of textile components and electronic circuits. With textile material with current-carrying properties, you can knit sensors, embroider wires or sew entire circuits. E-textile is part of an open source and DIY tradition within electronic art and at the same time in a textile art tradition where knowledge of techniques for the construction of flexible surfaces is crucial for how the circuits are built. An embroidered or sewn circle can be shaped, expanded and stretched to the desired expression, and thus becomes a meaning-bearing unit in itself.

Elisabeth Schimana
Schimana studied electro-acoustics and experimental music at the University of Music and
Performing Arts Vienna, computermusic-composition at the IEM, Graz and musicology andethnology at the University of Vienna. Her work concentrated for many years on space / body /
electronic. She has ongoing cooperations with the Austrian Kunstradio. She also focus on research
in the field of woman, art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and holds composition
workshops all over the world.