Faculty of Design

Material Art & Design

Khadija Aziz

Machine & Me (Process 5)

Machine & Me is a series of textile glitch art that seeks to demonstrate a visual progression of my attempts to distort an image using hand and digital means. Unlike traditional glitch art that requires no hand labour and craftsmanship, my work bridges the gap between textile-making techniques and collaboration with digital technologies. My process-based practice combines critical inquiry with textile-making to create unexpected surface outcomes by playing with hand and digital distortion methods that are guided by spontaneity and investigate errors of the human hand. These methods of surface design produce unique colours, shapes, and patterns that would be impossible without the collaboration between hand and machine. After following a predetermined order of sequence of manipulation, the distorted image was printed onto fabric to be embellished with beads and embroidery techniques to introduce new colours and textures in the artwork. Then, the distorted surface was dragged across a flatbed scanner following the scanner’s light to distort the image. In this step, I as the artist lose agency over the outcome as it will be determined by the scanner’s engagement with the texture of beads and speed of my hands’ movements. The results from this method of scanning are usually elongated, superimposed beads, abstracted woven texture of the fabric, and new colours introduced by the scanner’s light.The overall colours of the scanned, distorted image were then enhanced on PhotoShop to reflect the vibrancy of the overall series of work. Then, the new image was printed onto fabric to be embellished further with beads and embroidery techniques. It was in this step where new colours and textures could be introduced through beads and threads to motivate uniquely distorted outcomes in future manipulations and prints. The outcome of such intentional play is a series of mixed-media textiles that reveal processes as layers of memories of materials and the artist’s hand.