Signal to Noise

This commissioned installation was created for the National Communication Museum in Melbourne as part of their 2025 exhibition Signal to Noise, which explores how artists engage with technological disruptions and distortions.

Developed specifically for the National Communication Museum as an expansion of Ancient Futures, this work is an experiential woven installation that responds in real time to the emotional content of stories shared by visitors. Using AI-driven sentiment analysis, fiber optics, and traditional weaving techniques, the installation visualizes data through shifting light and color. Each story a visitor shares becomes a new pulse of light reflected into the textile's surface, part of a pattern that grows more intricate the longer the piece remains on view.

Craftwork was invited to explore how emerging tools, machine learning and soft electronics among them, can extend the long history of textiles as vessels for memory, coded language, and collective experience. Woven cloth has always carried information: pattern as memory, structure as syntax, long before those ideas had names. Ancient Futures picks up that thread, translating the sentiment of a spoken story into light woven directly into cloth; a signal made visible, then made permanent.