Cultural Tech-Fusion Fabrics

After a month of intensive work, Colleen is completing her Emotion garment for the Zero 1 Biennial 2010.  It is amazing for me, a novice textile designer, to see my fabric designs used in Collen Quen's creations. More info on this installation, TECHstlye SoftWEAR Surface & Shape, at the San San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles on their  upcoming exhibits page. Also info on project here: http://fusionwearsv.sjquiltmuseum.org/artists.php .

Today in the San Jose Mercury New there was an article about The Zero1 Art & Technology Biennial 2010. This article is more specifically about the music and general info (does mention the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles). More detailed info will be out on Thursday in the EYE section of the paper.

Today some installations begin in South Hall, San Jose. I am very excited to be a part of this exciting Arts & Technology Biennial and am very excited to be working with artists Rick Lee and Colleen Quen!

I have been working with Rasteriods Design in San Jose on creating the logo for the ZERO1 textile project with The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Rasteriods came up with the microsite name "Fusionwear SV" for the project. They also created a series of type studies with the name. Pulling from these studies I created this concept below which incorporated a few more graphical elements. It is hard to see here, but I added a dotted line path into the text which alludes to stitching, to topography lines and to paths. I pulled "wear" down and had it link to the "O" in fusion to create a focal point. I added a dot over the "i" to counter balance the dot in the "O".  Anyway, we will see tomorrow what the museum thinks of our studies.

Below is a quick study I did for how we might pull visual elements from logo into site map design. The green dots on the branching green stalk would show links upon roll over.

I have two projects in the works relating to textiles. One is a NEA grant funded project reflecting on the public's views of Silicon Valley identity (ZERO1 Biennial) and the other (Creative Work Fund application in progress) centers around our past and present visual vocabulary through cultural textiles of Santa Clara County.  For this cultural focus I am working on a logo and press release for the image collection days at libraries. I want to be sure people come!
Here are a few studies.  My first public textile documentation event will be through the Cupertino Library for Asian Heritage Month, May 17th, from 6-9 in The Cupertino Community Hall. The library will be handling all the press as they are folding this data collection event into their programming.  People will bring cultural garments and textiles for me to photograph and document in writing what they are. I will also have a white garment upon which I will have a projector projecting images of my preliminary designs...something visually engaging so that they can visualize that all will come together into textiles and garment at a future date.

I met with Rasteriods Design and The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and we decided to create an explanatory animation of the public contributing images for textile design. Here is my stab at that Flash animation.

I am trying to learn Flash. I was thinking for the Zero1 textile project I would create an animated logo that represented the coming together of many people's ideas.  This is super rough... the title is not even set yet. The theme of the festival is Build Your World. We are exploring people's ideas of Silicon Valley identity through textile and style. I banged this out for a meeting this morning so, yes, type is over run by the motifs and it is too busy...but I like the general idea of components coming together. I'll be working with the design firm Rasteriods on building the online components of the project. They have build Japantown San Jose's website and beautiful street banners. I look forward to learning from them.