Ancient Futures is a multi-layered woven textile 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.
Ancient Futures, featured in the WSA Demo 2024 show and The New York Times Art section, collects secrets 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 triple cloth, overshot and modular weaving along with futuristic materials including fiber optics, proximity sensors, speech-to-text software, AI-based sentiment analysis, and LEDs. The woven cloth itself will visualize the collected secrets 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 secrets grows, the textile will also change. Its colors will adjust based on the nature of those secrets 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.
As the textile travels and encounters more people - more secrets - 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.
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