Our exposure to resist dying opened our eyes to some surprising techniques for manipulating cloth. We both admired the way silk organza in particular will easily retain the “memory” of a shape or texture that is applied to it, yet remains fluid and dynamic. This duality spurred the idea of transient messages, specifically one that could momentarily vanish and re-emerge from within its environment.

To materialize this concept, we used laser-cut wooden letters as resists that imprinted a 3-dimensional mark in our silk organza sheet. When at rest, they protrude from the surface to spell out “muted surprise”. When pulled taught, they disappear. We backed this surface with a darker polyester organza sheet, which we’d hope would create enough contrast for a viewer to read the text.

Our rigging process involved creating two infrastructures for horizontal movement so that the foreground sheet could expand width-wise. The back sheet used a simple vertical rig with a floor counterweight.

If we were to approach this concept again, we would consider using differently colored fabrics to create smooth kinetic color gradients.