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Artist Weaves the Sounds of Endangered Spaces into Textiles

In Mika Tajima’s acoustic portraits, the disappearance of Pennsylvania’s factories is looming.
All images courtesy Mika Tajima, Installation View at Eleven Rivington, NY. 2014. Negative Entropy (Caledonia Dye Works, quad) at right and Negative Entropy (Edward J. Darby & Son Pennsylvania Wireworks, quad) at left.

The works in Mika Tajima’s Negative Entropy series are markers of a time soon to be lost. During a residency at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, Tajima worked in conjunction with FWM staff to record the sounds of several Pennsylvania factories, transfer those files into image files, and then weave those images using a jacquard loom. In a symbolic twist, the resultant fabric is stretched onto acoustic baffling felt, as though silencing the industry portrayed in the pieces. “For me, this is a process of translations—immaterial information into a material object,” says Tajima.

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The artist titles these works like data labels, with the location of the recording, then either the word “single” or “quad,” indicating whether the weaving represents a single image of the design, or the same design reproduced four times. “The loom is much like a printer or silkscreen—mechanical image production, in a sense. The design width is fixed at 27" while it weaves at 54" wide, therefore doubling the design and then this repeats vertically,” the artist explains to The Creators Project.

The locations visited included textile factories (Caledonian Dye Works, Langhorne Carpet Company, and Material Technology & Logistics) as well as data centers at Philadelphia Technology Park, and Edward J. Darby & Son, a “leader in wire mesh solutions since 1854.” Scanning the websites of some of these companies, one comes across words such as “persevere” and “old world craft still thrives”—but for how long?

Currently, Tajima continues to push this series and plans on weaving new acoustic portraits—of human speech, this time around. She's gathering recordings of the voices of various translators, in the broad sense of the term: a legendary figure in the Tokyo avant-garde scene who translated seminal Western philosophical writing into Japanese; a designer who translates images into digital information in order to weave textiles; and a punch card operator who transcribes visual patterns into the die-cut cards that program looms.

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A solo show of Mika Tajima's work, accompanied by an artist book published by ThreeStarBooks, will be on view at Taro Nasu Gallery in Tokyo in October, followed by a second solo show at Eleven Rivington in February 2016. See more of her work here.

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