About the artwork

Ancient Futures by Craftwork is a multi-layered woven textile by whose surface visually fluctuates based on the sentiment analysis of visitors’ shared stories. It is a participatory media installation capturing sonic textures and creating an evolving fabric of soundscape.

Inspired by the textiles that have held humanity’s stories across time and space, this installation is made with soft electronics to collect, store and cumulatively visualize solicited stories from viewers using sentiment analysis and long term data-textile storage. Ancient Incans used knotted cords called Quipu to document economic and civil data. Enslaved people created a system of railroad quilts to silently signal risks and safe spaces as they traversed the Antebellum Southern USA. During WWII, women knit secret war strategies into the sweaters of spies. Technical methods in weaving, knitting, sewing, etc. are able to hide and deliver sensitive details and encode important messages with a visual language that all humans are intimately familiar with: textile. We are creating a current, modern precedent in this textile tradition: “Ancient Futures” is a connection to the past and the future. One day this technology will be vintage, just as the quilting, weaving and sewing of precedents past was innovative for the time yet common and almost invisible today.

Ancient Futures collects stories from anyone who shares them and visually animates the data across the textile using time as a dynamic variable to create an adaptive weaving. It is woven utilizing ancient traditions in multi-shaft cloth, overshot and modular weaving along with futuristic materials including fiber optics, speech-to-text software, sentiment analysis, and LEDs. The woven cloth itself will visualize the collected stories via a visual encoded system of color based on sentiment analysis via animations across the fiber optic LEDs. Over the lifetime of the textile and as the collection of stories grows, the textile will also change. Its colors will adjust based on the nature of those stories and timestamps. For example, increased expression of frustration could change portions of it towards blue while increased expression of joy could change other sections towards red.

Simultaneously evocative of the transmission of signals over telephone, while touching upon the origins of computing in the Jacquard loom into the modern era of computation, Ancient Futures opens Signal to Noise with an acknowledgement of collected stories meant to be communicated silently, in light. Signal can be found in silence.

As the textile travels and encounters more people-more stories, its surface will become more dynamic and complex. In traveling around the globe, we hope this textile will be able to capture a sense of what it is like to be a human in the world right now, using the ancient wisdom of textile coding and the futuristic potential of digital technology.

Ancient Futures also delves into the realm of artificial intelligence, incorporating tools like ChatGPT to process and interpret the emotions of our visitors. By integrating AI into the operation and evolution of this piece, we explore new, pervasive technology as well as the intersection of human emotion and machine learning. While the use of AI in this context might suggest a capacity for nuanced understanding, here "nuance" emerges less as precision and more as ambiguity—a kind of poetic fuzziness introduced by the machine's attempt to grasp human sentiment. Rather than clarifying meaning, the sentiment analysis becomes another layer, refracting visitors' stories through the imperfect lens of a language model. In this way, AI contributes to a dynamic visualization that embraces uncertainty, misreading, and interpretive slippage.

In-progress shot of Ancient Futures, commissioned by NCM.

Ancient Futures at NCM. Photo by Phoebe Powell

About the artists

Craftwork is the joint practice of Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello where they explore the nature of textiles and technology through installations, storytelling, and material-based research. Their broad-based skillset focuses on creative technologies, textile fabrication, and novel materials explored through historical and cultural contexts. Embracing collaboration, they intentionally engage in experimental techniques in both the physical and digital realms, frequently intertwined.

Craftwork. Supplied by artists.

Signal to Noise

Ancient Futures is now on display as part of Sign

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