Intellectual Property Statement: The contents of this page are protected by Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights. Images and Ideas contained or attached to this page cannot be used by individuals or organisations without direct written permission, license, or agreement given by Rachel Wolfe.

MAGNETICS IN-MATERIAL Objective

Magnetics In-Material weaves aesthetic movements from earth’s history. Magnetic emanations from the earth are woven to form visual representations. The textiles create an earth-based narrative from a geological perspective of time. Demarcated by textures and colours woven based on the recordings from the earth, the invisible forces from within the earth become Visual, Sensual (tactile), and Actual (woven). The textiles reveal understandings in human relationships with nature and present iterative opportunities to make textile(s) of the magnetic records at a variety of sites. Potential themes could be, but not limited to, locations of cultural and historical significance such as shrines, pilgrimage routes, or political and humanitarian organisations such as NATO and UNESCO. 

Field of Artistic Research  

Magnetics In-Material is a cross disciplinary artistic research project encompassing embodied cognition, imaging structures, textile, geologic sciences for epistemic investigations. The artistic research aims to look at the way images are both felt and understood, from a bottom-up approach. 

Research Question(s) 

How do places make people? Further questions here and expanded later on in Project Summary Goals: 

• Can creating a sense of place be a viable concept for geographic empathy?
• Ways touch and subjective experience contribute to quests for objectivity.
• Creating sites for understanding, intuition, and subjectivity in technocratic culture and climate changes. 
• Usefulness of statistical data models in evaluating Intelligence.
• Responsibilities of data science and influences images have on social policy.
• Art as supporting diversity in cultural rituals and identities. 
• To what extent can culture support the disintegration of identity politics in favour of earth-based perspectives in the history of human behaviour, environmental fluctuations, social formations.
• Can materials and production afford reliable alternatives to present-day socio-economic models.

Background, Research Context, Goals, Methods

Magnetics In-Material (Mi-M) developed from 6-years Pattern Recognition project. The project looks at the idea of A.I., landscape photography, and 1970’s American Land Art movement. With the orientation of working-with and not over emerges a biologically, ontological question: what creates a body? and the Mi-M question: how do places make people? The project and process looks at ways of working in relationship with nature, instead of using, or looking at, nature as pure resource. 

Gathered rocks from meditative hikes were numbered, archived, and drawn. Rock faces were made into drawings, drawings into choreography, and the feeling of the movements into the template for the visual textile project, Magnetics In-Material. By connecting my background with photography, image making and installation, dance and performance with my interests in geology and dating, the project realises several goals:

• Giving people a sense of understanding through experience
• Reprieve from alienation through creating belonging by connecting with nature
• Temporal and sensorial reminders of wholeness and warmth in relations with nature
• Realise the impossible act of hugging the visual field 
• The body becoming in relationship with a place
• Sharp textures into soft experiences
• Absolute and brutal beauty of weather patterns into physically engaging comfort materials.

Magnetics In-Material weaves sensorial experience, repairing alienation by making the imaginary tactile. Woven fibres serve as temporal warmth. In creating a cultural way to connect with movements deep within the earth through touch, Magnetics In-Material weaves together traditions in art, technology, and social psychology.

Process & Reflexive Documentation

Utilise remnant magnetic data from organisations such as Norge’s Geologiske Undersøkelse and International Geoscience Organsiations, sourcing data to create dimensional textiles, such as jacquards with TC2 Loom technology, to show the top and inside, as interrelated surfaces. 

The process of the artistic research project based on the theory of how places making people, and study of pre-existing natural, magnetic phenomena. Magnetics are related to knowledge production in physics, the ontological question of existence whether or not humans observe the phenomenon. The process therefore involves ideas on documentation to bring human understanding with greater sensitivity with the nature. The fields have become politicised, and so the process and documentation will remain diligent to cite and source facts from peer-reviewed organisations. By exposing observations and facts alongside the project, the research already being done can come into public awareness alongside the textiles, creating site specific visual reference via Magnetics In-Material textiles.

Photographs/images, videos, writing as documentation of the process, as well as the formation of a visual database. The project can serve as a grounds for establishing a company that can bridge science and art. Organisation and design of the textiles, production, quality control and compiling the artworks to an exhibition. The goal is to eventually one day have designs created by hand at Gobelin.

Project Outline

Organisation and design of the textiles, production, quality control and compiling the artworks to an exhibition. The goal is to eventually one day have one of the designs created by hand at Gobelin.

• • Gather and Organise Geographic Data
  • Establish Structure for Project Elements and Publishing
  • Generate a Database of Texts, Sounds, and Visual Translations
  • Converting Geologic Frequencies into Sounds and Colour Spectrums in a Unique Aesthetic Database
  • Experimentation with Textiles for Conductivity, Sound, and Luminance Materials
  • Programming for Machine Output and Materialisation
  • Finalised Textile Production Through Machine Weaving (future goal production at Gobelin, FR)
  • Publishing of Project Elements and Results
  • Public Exhibition and Performance

Provisional Time Table and Work Plan

Year One 

• • Gather and Organise Geographic Data 
  • Establish Structure for reflexive project archive in an archive, web and print 
  • Converting Geologic Frequencies into Sounds and Colour
    Spectrums creating a Unique Database 
  • Weave Textile Designs from this Database 
  • Experiment with Materials for Conductivity, Sound,
    Luminance 
  • Produce Digitally Woven Samples 

Year Two 

• • Finalised Textile Production via Digital/Hand Machine
    Weaving 
  • Publishing of Project Elements, Reflexive Documentation
    (including video) and Results 
  • Choreography for the final exhibition 
  • Public Exhibition and Performance 
  • Finalisation & Publishing 
  • Process for therapeutic or social integration

Year Three And Beyond

• • Finalised Textile Production Through Machine Weaving
  • Publishing of Project Elements and Results 
  • Public Exhibition and Performance 
  • Finalisation & Publishing of Pedagogical Methodology (Possible Therapeutic or Social Integration Uses)

Year Four +Beyond

• • After first publication of dissertation and exhibition, repeat the process and production for more sites for exhibition and performance.

Budget

Potential Project Related Expenses

• • Workspace for production, shipping, or textile storage
  • Labor (personal or assistants), use of weaving machine: https://www.digitalweaving.no/product/ 
  • Sourcing yarns, fibres, and experimental materials (ex. copper or fibre optics)
  • Scholarships, Embassy Support, private donors, teaching fellowship, public workshops
  • Norge’s Geologiske Undersøkelse data is openly available for use
  • Travel for conferences, exhibitions, professional presentations, necessary networking 

Texts, Books, Journals, Research

Remnant Magnetism, https://www.britannica.com/science/remanent-magnetism
Norske Geologiske Undersøkelse, https://www.ngu.no 

Remanent magnetism (Paleomagnetism) or the permanent magnetism in rocks, resulting from the orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of rock formation in a past geological age is the source of information for the paleomagnetic studies of polar wandering and continental drift. Remanent magnetism can derive from several natural processes. This arises when magnetic minerals forming in igneous rocks cool through the Curie point and when the magnetic domains within the individual minerals align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field, thus making a permanent record of its orientation. 

A second mechanism operates when small grains of magnetic minerals settle into a sedimentary matrix, producing detrital remanent magnetism. It is hypothesised that the tiny grains orient themselves in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field during deposition and before the final consolidation of the rock. The magnetism thus introduced appears to persist through later alteration and compaction of the rock. 

Rocks may acquire remanent magnetism in at least two other ways: (1) rocks made up of nonmagnetic minerals chemically altered to yield magnetic minerals, and these newly formed minerals acquire remanent magnetism in the presence of the Earth’s magnetic field; and (2) igneous rocks already cooled may acquire remanent magnetism by a process called viscous magnetization. The difference between these types of remanent magnetism can be determined; magnetic history of a particular rock can therefore be interpreted via 6 basic types of magnetisation: (1) diamagnetism, (2) paramagnetism, (3) ferromagnetism, (4) antiferromagnetism, (5) ferrimagnetism, (6) superparamagnetism. 

Bibliography

Batchelor, David, Chromophobia, Reaktion Press, 2000.

Batchelor, David, The Luminous and the Gray, Reaktion Press, 2014.

Dragesund, Tove, and Alice Kvåle. “Study protocol for Norwegian Psychomotor Physiotherapy versus Cognitive Patient Education in combination with active individualized physiotherapy in patients with long-lasting musculoskeletal pain – a randomized controlled trial.” BMC musculoskeletal disorders vol. 17 325. 5 Aug. 2016, doi:10.1186/s12891-016-1159-8, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4974790/

Eco, Umberto, The Open Work, Harvard Univerity Press, 1989.

Eco, Umberto, Travels in Hyper Reality, Gruppo Editoriale, 1983

Eco, Umberto, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Ghezzo, Marta Arkossy, Solfege, Ear Training, Rhythm, Dictation, and Music Theory: A Comprehensive Course 3rd Edition, University Alabama Press, June 2005.

Haugeland, John, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, A Bradford Book, 1985.

Johnson, Don, The Protean Body, Harpercollins, 1977.

Klempe, Sven Hroar, Cultural Psychology of Musical Experience, Information Age Publishing, 2016.

Mansoor, Asma, De-Anthropologising the Human and its Impact on Racism: A Third World Perspective Proceedings of A Body of Knowledge, Embodied Cognition and the Arts Conference CTSA UCI, 8-10 Dec 2016, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ds0r585

Mate, Gabor, When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Wiley, January 2011.

Mate, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, North Atlantic Books, 2008.

Noë, Alva, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, Hill and Wang, September 2015. Noë, Alva, Varieties of Presence, Harvard University Press, 2009.

Noë, Alva, Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Hill and Wang, February 2009.

Sapowlsky, Robert, (neuroendocrinologist, author, professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences) Stanford Lectures, published by Stanford University on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, 1984.

Scarry, Elaine, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999.

Scarry, Elaine, Thinking In An Emergency, W.W. Norton & Company, March 2014.

Scarry, Elaine, Resisting Representation, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Scwhenk, Theodore, Sensitive Chaos, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965.

Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. M.D., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Penguin Random House, September 2014.

Artists

Ingrid Aarset’s work with textiles and technology.

Lygia Pape and Lygia Clarke, for their contributions to performances using textiles and groups of human bodies.

Pedro Gomez-Egaña for the spiritual in the technological age.

Amanda Steggel’s, Mind the Gap, work with synthesia and for mapping the way sounds relate to colors and energy centres of the body.

Dorothea Tanning’s surrealism to make the invisible but felt senses of lived experience tactile, formal, pictorial and spacial. 

Live Bugge’s, The Other Wild, for investigations on the boundaries on behavior and transgressions. 

Katrine Koster Holst’s work on the landscape changing over time.

Geir Harald Semuelsen’s work with light. 

Francesca Capone’s direct, literal, blocks discerning patterns.

Ethical Considerations

Privacy, GDPR, internet laws and regulations to access and storage of data, legal consent, public information, and privacy of individual contributions will be considered.

Translating data must be understood from the perspective of artistic choices, underlined by the effort to maintain elemental integrity. Considering subjectivity in processes borrowed from scientific methodology, actual realised results cannot be considered wholly objective. This shall be acknowledged, questioned, written, and shared in presentations, publications, and future developments from the Magnetics In-Material project.

The research methodologies to be considered as critical or negotiable features for future research methodologies and with the possibility for other institutional use, pedagogical developments in the realm of private or government institutions, or public domain.

The research and pedagogical approach developed during the project are free to be used for running workshops and courses alongside the project. These courses can be used for enriching local cultural exchange, as an educational resource and site for additional funding of the project.

Resourcing local production to minimise international shipping or travel expenses.

Insurance for the artwork, machines, materials, and data, to be purchased and maintained throughout the duration of the research and productions thereafter.

Language, writing and documentation will be reviewed for facts and technical accuracy. The number of unforeseeable ethical considerations will be consulted through the advisory team, faculty, and staff, considering international copyright and intellectual property laws.