Cultural Tech-Fusion Fabrics

The installation is almost complete!

This morning I had a meeting with Colleen Quen and Rick Lee to review textile designs, color, fabrics and scale. We also decided on a name for the installation: Suface & Shape: Reflections on Silicon Valley. The museum wished to modify the name to fit the grant application, so the final name is:
TECHstyle SoftWEAR: Surface & Shape

Below: I was amazed by how quickly Colleen honed in on the patterns she was draw to for each garment. She will be making one for a woman and one for a man. She selected three fabrics for each.

Below are the revisions to colors and scaling of designs after Colleen's feedback. The top row is for the woman's garment. The bottom textile row is for the man's garment. I ordered silk test swatches from Kent State University's School of Fashion's  TechStyleLAB and cotton lawn swatches from Spoonflower .

Rick shared some great concept sketches for the installation. I am so very excited for this collaboration!

This design below draws upon fusionwear sv images submitted of Eichler architecture by Kathleen Peters, San Jose City Hall and Spanish tile roofs...all part of our visual vocabulary here in Silicon Valley. The design is also meant to riff off of sari textile design and colors. Anu Guda submitted many amazing saris for me to document and in the process got me thinking about weaving techniques and color schemes.  Colors were pulled from a color palette from  fusionwear sv image submissions and from Anu's textiles.

Spanish tile design created in Illustrator above inspired by local Spanish tile roofs such as at Hayes Mansion. Example here is a Quinceanera photo by Hector Villablanca.

Here is the third textile fabric I am working on for the fusionwear sv project. This textile reflects on information graphics, speed of and nodes of connections in Silicon Valley. I ran several websites (Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, fusionwear sv and the San Jose International Airport) through a freeware applet, Aharef, which renders websites graphically. I ran one lay of the imagery through a motion blur to allude to the rapid pace of life here. I wanted to use this type of information graphic representation as the resulting forms remind me of spores blown on the wind.