What future for textiles?

Tilt the vessel and the roots redirect. Modulate the light, the pattern changes. The technique is simple; what grows from it is anything but.

Carole Collet spent over a decade learning to work at the pace of a cactus, aerial roots, mycelium – treating garden and grow-tank as studio, plant and fungus as collaborators. "Designing (for and with) Living Systems" gathers fifteen years of this inquiry: botanical studies, speculative provocations, slow-manufactured objects. Learning the plant's terms, then bending them.

https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/designing_living_systems/

A different material, a different decade, the same question in a different key. Move the body and the light redirects. "Membranes and Meshworks" compiles twenty-five years of work at the intersection between textiles and (wearable) computing. Costumes teaching bodies how to move before the wearers knew it was happening; collaborators building materials that sense and answer back in real time.

https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/membranes_and_meshwork/

Brussels, 2005: Joanna Berzowska asks a room of people trying to work out what these new, active materials are actually for: "Who are the actors, what is the stage, where does the activity happen?" She speaks of electroluminescent wires and soft circuits, not fungus, but her questions hold. Who initiates the change? Neither of these texts supplies a single answer. Instead, they keep answering: different answers, different timescales – split-second responses, then nine years of cactus fur.

Another answer, smaller and stranger: "Edible Alchemy", Collet's work with Bartaku on flax, aronia and edible photovoltaics; a tendril a dedicated post would have severed – pigment, current, and taste meeting, for a moment, on someone's tongue. 

https://anarchive.fo.am/green/edible_alchemy/