week8-self initiated project process

Create textile swatched which will incorporate traditional and innovative fabrication methods, twist of traditional embroidery combined with conductive thread. Conductive thread would enable LED lights to illuminate certain part of the print and in that way bring attention to it. Involvement of distance sensor which reacts in a certain way to the LED lights themselves.

In order to have a red thread through all the samples and that all the samples include certain elements which connects them I was thinking of a story through which I could achieve this.

I have found a project from Antoine Bridier-Nahmias, magical Contamination which is exploring the molds (fungus), bacterias and yeasts on a visual level.
(http://magical-contamination.tumblr.com)

Goal: to make 3 textile swatches which will change the brightness according to the information received from a distance sensor

Since I was gone for the first 4 days of the self initiated project I decided to dedicate those days purely to research and focus on all the possibilities there are to find the correct red thread. I started with searching for inspiring textures, elements which could be a starting point for my direction of the textile concept.

what I find interesting about these two projects is that the yarn is used only to connect together different kinds of textures and on the right picture the sewing holes of the mesh are used to intertwine with the 'paper roles' and that at the end created a texture instead of having flat surface

cubes create a surface, so the result is very 3D texture, which each has it's own style because of the hand drawings and colours

both of these pictures include sewing and Ann odd material which has been stitched and turned into textile, first one is a bag which has been embroidered in a way that it becomes more durable and visually nicer, the second are paper cards which has been sewn together in a very irregular way

I declared clearly my goals of fabrication techniques I want to use and those were: UV printing, laser cutting and vacuum forming. As a base I took the pictures of funguses and manipulated them in photoshop in order to be able to create a print out of it which could be printed onto fabric.

All the fabrics that I have printed on are neoprenes so purely synthetic but the effect was really different based on different layers of whites and colours. Th very first one has a very 'splashes', 'blurred' effect which actually by accident turned out very well, since it gets a really organic feel. The other sample was with double layer of colour which caused a very saturated look.

laser cutting the paper to see how the shapes of funguses which I have traced in illustrator turn out

first thing I have done is laser cut the fabric with traced funguses and afterwards I have created the mould for the vacuum former in order that I could vacuum the foam, important learning point was that in order to create the vacuumed fabric which is going to fit on the laser cut fabric, is that you have to turn the mould in the opposite direction because otherwise you get mirrored forms

what bring attention on this picture are the different textures, the feathers are layered with really geometrical mesh, then the alufolia is layered on soft peach coloured textile and the plastic laser cut circles are connected to red embroidered yarn

After finding all these inspiring visuals I decided to combine several different textures myself as well and the red thread would have been the embroidery and same fabrication method.

What really inspired me about this project is that he has made such a beautiful project out of something considered 'gross'. His intention was purely aesthetical but it caused many questions on a biological level, why did this appear in a certain colour, why is that one big etc. Instead of being discussed by hearing about bacterias, he turned it into something worth being enthusiastic about, that bring your attention and not because it looks 'disgusting' but beautiful.

I decided to proceed with the idea of visualising something 'gross' and making something beautiful out of it. Nowadays so much contamination and toxic elements around us: important to see we can also incorporate those 'bad', 'negative' parts into our design practices and visualisations, not to just make look everything look so perfect. One of the intentions is to make appreciation for the imperfect.

I have made several experiments on 3 different fabrics with different layers, one with only colour, double colour and with several layers of white, just to see how the print turns out

first I created the outlines of the pictures from fungus project and because I couldn't select a certain shape, I traced it in 2nd layer and created my own fungus shapes, which turned out to be good since I made my own variation of the funguses

the end result of a full day of experimenting, UV printed samples, laser cut shapes and vacuumed foam with some extra paper experiments

LILY PAD ARDUINO AND CODING

First step was to connect the Lily Pad Arduino correctly, to install the drivers and to make the distance sensor work.

I started by looking at Frietzing drawing from Duy-Linh and from that it followed the conclusion that I have to connect the Gnd And Vcc pins to - and + on the Arduino, since it doesn't have shortcut for certain volts or ground.

this was the code I started of with

since the code encountered errors, I contacted Kaj for possible solutions and he suggested me to look at this picture, because the numbers of the pins as written on Arduino Lily Pad might differ from the actual numbers

the code still wasn't working after changing the PIN numbers, I followed the step by step Lily pad Arduino guide (https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/LilyPadWindows) and installed the drivers they have mentioned, after uploading the code the next error appeared
'the programmer is not responding'

afterwards I tried all the possible programers and at the end it worked with the following

the code for the sensor finally was successfully uploaded to Lily Pad Arduino, so the incorporation of the LED lights followed

the situation that I have encountered was that sensor was using both + and - pins on the Lily Pad Arduino but LED light of course has to use those as well, so it both worked if I plugged them onto Arduino separately but not at once

after talking to Shirley, she explained to me that the LED light needs to be connected on + to one of the pins and with - to the - on the Lily Pad Arduino, so you are able to control the LED with that certain + pin then, important to keep in mind is that only certain pins are digital and others analogue

Loes has gave me the boards that she has made once before, her example of an LED and she explained to me how to solder the LED lights. I was able to do it myself instead of just buying them, I got to understand how they actually work.

soldering the LED lights

After having the working components I decided what exactly do I want my lights to do with the distance and how samples should differ from each other. I wrote code in 3 sketches and then joined them together in one final one.

MAKING FINAL SAMPLES

The first step was to laser cut all the fabrics. After that I prepared the mould for vacuum machine. And at the end I have printed the fabric swatched which had to be printed with an UV printer.