Ambient session at Overheading. Huaqian Zhant
The exhibition ‘Overheating’ by Huaqian Zhang proposes an installation that follows the principles of design in order to create an encounter between the technical and industrial dimension of knitting machines with the warmth and craftsmanship of sewing and manual labor. For this new production project, Huaqian takes a knitting machine and intervenes it with Arduino, referencing the Jacquard loom, one of the predecessors of computing and databases in binary language. Huaqian works from transdisciplinarity, bridging the gap between pattern design for clothing or building plans, knitting a scarf or wiring a circuit board. In Huaqian’s practice, links are generated between art and design, taking art as a means to deal with the world, a processor fueled with critical analysis as input, yielding a disruptive output, and design as the translation of these results into technified and systematized products.