Kinetic Fabrics brings together the fields of robotics and textiles to explore their unified creative and expressive potential. For Spring 2021, we will be exploring questions surrounding telepresence using textiles.

Telepresence refers to the technologies used to transmit one’s presence over distance. The concept is intrinsically bidirectional, as it implies both perception of a remote location as well as a capacity to create a remote effect. In contemporary usage, telepresence often refers to using a robot as an avatar to represent a person using a robot as a remote proxy body. However, the term is flexible and in the broadest sense could include the telephone and video conferencing as means for creating the illusion of presence at a remote location.

This semester we plan to explore this idea of the proxy body in the context of animate textile artifacts. We will make wearables and sculptures which incorporate actuators, sensors, and computing which is capable of remote communication. With these means we will discover the potential for non-visual forms of remote presence and address the question of how the essence of human presence or absence can be expressed in a tactile experience.

Please note that all class meetings will be held via Zoom. The class is listed with an IRR modality to allow for possible lab usage, but no regular class meetings will be held on campus. The Zoom session and password are available to logged-in users.

More details can be found in the Syllabus. This is the third iteration of this course, and the results of the previous iterations can be viewed at Spring 2020 and Spring 2019.