Augmented antique industrial bobbin-lace machine. 2013. Remfabriken, Gothenburg, Sweden.
A lace-making machine is like a physical explosion of the pattern underlying the lace. What was once made by hand is now done by lightning-fast shuttles.
Critters was created during a collaboration between Göteborgs Remfabriken, a former textile mill and “living museum” and The School of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg. The movement of the antique lace machine presents a physical representation of the abstract textile pattern that controls it, encoded in punched cards that are fed into the machine.
The movement of the spools of thread was illuminated with LEDs, showing the role of each spool and their movements in the machine, as animals, or dancers.
