All the things you are not yet...the public showing

The singing quilts that I have been working on for the last year finally have a public showing at Paths to Utopia at the Inigo Rooms at Somerset House London.  The show runs from Friday 1 July – Sunday 2 October 2016
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/Cultural/Cultural-Institute/Utopia2016/Utopia2016.aspx

The image above shows one of the speakers embroidered into the piece.  If you touch the quilt you trigger a sound file.  The sound level is very subtle so the piece has a ghost like quality as you can hear the boys featured in the imagery of the quilt singing ‘Twinkle twinkle’.

As you can imagine I am very excited about this opportunity.  There have been some major technical obstacles to overcome in the creation of this piece and if truth be told still to overcome.   I’ll spill the beans on those in future posts but I would like to specially thank Brendan Michael who has been an absolute star as well as Matthew Howard and Bowen Han all from KCL, the team at Pfaff sewing machines and Neil Halford from thread suppliers Benton and Johnson.

Meet the boys

October 2013: a young woman leans over a medical technician and takes a photograph of a computer monitor with her mobile phone. On the screen are images of the two bundles of cells that the technician is about to implant in her womb. The woman was my partner’s sister, Lynsey Mogg, and the cells go on to grow into her two sons, Rufus and Rafe.

I think this image is one of the most remarkable photos I have ever seen in my life.  

 It’s the starting point for the Paths to Utopia project that will be at Somerset House this summer.  The plan is that  the image will be printed onto fabric and then embroider speakers into it to make a ‘singing quilt’.  The quilt will then play a sound file of the boys when you are in front of the piece.

Oh yes, and this is how they looked when they had a very exciting afternoon out at the park near our house.

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.

Embroidered Speakers Part 1

We have begun developing the embroidered speakers for the Paths to Utopia project.  I am working with Dr Matthew Howard from the Centre for Robotics Research, KCL and one of his students Bowen Han.  The samples in the picture are a variety of stitched wires and conductive threads.   Unusually for me these first samples were all free motion embroidered by hand with a mixture of couching and cabling.  The first test was to see if we could get signal to go through the circuits and we managed it on all the samples.  Of course some samples were better than others but we could get an audible but quiet ‘buzz’.  That was because we weren’t amplifying the signal but we will look to try and do that later in the process.

The next stage was to actually digitally embroider the speakers for two reasons.  We can accurately measure the length of the thread so we can then accurately work out the electronics and secondly because they do look lovely when they are done that was.

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.