Soft_Ware

Ry David Bradley, Elisa Breyer, Leah Emery, Sandra Kosorotova, Katrin Steiger, Paul Yore, Dardan Zhegrova

Curated by Sarah Crowe and David Ashley Kerr 

Read On Threading The Digital by Donna Schons at www.softandhardwares.com

From soft to hard technologies and back again, textiles are not an oppositional force, but relative to the digital on a spectrum of textile tactility and digital intangibility. This exhibition of international artists presents textile works engaging with hyperconsumerism, internet culture and the post-digital, and superseded technologies that have gained new resonance in our immaterial digital ether. Soft_Ware is not the first to note that textiles have exploded in contemporary art. What it does ask is why textiles are the current medium of choice for artists to dissect the digital age.

Seven millennial artists explore how and why the very medium that spawned the digital’s historical advent, textiles, so aptly serves as the post-digital medium and message to unpick it. The similarities between textiles and digital technologies are uncannily pronounced. Parallels begin with their shared vocabulary: grid, network, web, thread. The genesis of digital terminology is the language of the loom. Thus, a return to this very apparatus, the loom as a symbol for textile craft, aids in grappling with the nature of an all-consuming digital existence, and digital technology comes full circle. The digital mirroring of textile methods that underpin the concept and structure of the internet is refracted back from the virtual realm by young contemporary artists who have grown up parallel to its inception.

That the punch card system used to work the machine-operated jacquard loom in the 1800s is regarded as the conceptual predecessor to computing technology is only a rather ironic textile/technology beginning. It stored its own information, functioned with its own software and dispersed the weavers’ centralised control throughout its hardware. The works in Soft_Ware extend this concept into something akin to textile cybernetics. The pervasive power of an endless matrix of threads engulfing the digital body resurfaces in the physical realm as a dual form of both post-digital resistance and collective therapy.

Millennial artists are now reclaiming textile practices to reinstate their own (humanly flawed) identities, relationships and connection to the world by subverting technological control through textile practices. Meaning is both inscribed and derived through the inherent tactile nature of textiles as they forefront a post-digital consciousness in contemporary art. Will hard tech be smooth enough to replace genuine touch and our tactile desire as creatures that need to come together for survival? It is here that Soft_Ware counters what the digital realm has widely forfeited: touch and texture. It considers this turn to the digital, contemplating how textiles—marked by the touch of human error, laced with the scent of the human body, and inscribed with memories of the human experience—can usurp our techno-utopia one pierce of the sewing needle at a time.

Funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Thuringia, Germany, the Cultural Directorate of the City of Erfurt, and the Thuringian State Chancellery.