All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. October 1953, printed in Internationale Situationniste #1
Electroknit Dymaxion is a sculpture that draws on Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map — a two-dimensional map that folds into an angular sphere, a three-dimensional icosahedron that represents the globe. The sculpture is constructed in wood, with a machine-knitted interior made up of global textile patterns spatially mapped to their relative location. The patterns are recorded from century-old notebooks, manuscripts, vintage craft magazines, knitting machine handbooks — all accessed through Boston based libraries and archives, with a few patterns downloaded as PDFs from the far corners of the internet. I and my student/alumni team, the 5-person collective Lattice20 (Nia Duong, Maria Gonzalez, Remy Hunter, Erica Imoisi, Tony Pierre), transcribed numerous patterns pixel by pixel, clipping them into a punch-card read by our “Electroknit” knitting machine.
The dymaxion map was designed by Fuller in 1943 to decentralize parts of the globe. The spatial display orients the poles sideways along longitude lines with the regions projected onto 20 triangles. The triangles do not delineate boundaries, borders or continents but instead emphasize them as a contiguous landmass. Central to the imagining of the dymaxion were ideas about human kinship and sustainability. This slick modernist exterior is blended with the sculpture’s machine knitted interior, a global mapping of textile designs displaying the often overlooked and undervalued ornamental patterns that persist in the decorative arts.
The research process was inspired in part by the Situationists’ concept of psychogeography, but in our case we are wandering through archives, not cities. The research experience was similar to pre-internet drifting through libraries led by off-the shelf finds, flipping through craft books like an analog performance of a google image search. We were sifting for grid-based charts and largely skipping over the books’ context, then transcribing motifs that fit within the grid-based framework designed to be copied and adapted, as in the tradition of a needlework sampler.
The experience and content of the work was shaped by the collaboration with Lattice20. One of our early discussions was led by an idea that Nia Duong was using as an instructor in Woven Wednesdays, an art workshop in an Asian American Studies course called, Asian Women in the U.S. at UMass Boston. Students participated in weaving together stories related to critical topics such as oppression, gender roles, and grandmother’s knowledge. For the duration of the project, I was moved by Nia’s thoughts on “grandmother’s knowledge,” likely because I, too, acquired the language of craft from my first-generation grandmother.
As Nia puts it:
“In my heart and mind, grandmother’s knowledge is the connection to one’s own family history, traditions, and skills. I find that my relationship with my grandmother is bridging the intergenerational gap. She is my source to all things that are Vietnamese. My grandmother had shared her food stories, surviving war, and living life in post-war Vietnam. She also taught me the importance of learning how to stitch and sew textiles. My grandmother’s knowledge help inform my artistic practice as a fiber and textile artist.”
Another member of Lattice20, Maria Gonzalez, a double major in Art and Latin American and Iberian Studies saw her pattern transcriptions in relation to translation:
“In translation, respect to, and making sense of, what is being adapted is important and requires a lot of trial and error. In the same way with the research, transcribing and the rest of the process required some mistakes ultimately to have a good product from the design. Being from a place in Latin America myself, my research on the region had extended beyond my studies. It’s even more important to me to make sure textile designs are included in a way as respectful as possible, given that we couldn’t consult the actual communities they came from. Almost all of the designs from Latin America come from indigenous cultures that already have a history of exploitation and appropriation.”
Engaging such concerns about asymmetrical global power operations while also entertaining the possibility of alternative dynamics, post-colonial scholar Bina Gogineni during her studio visit helped contextualize our process.
She says, “I tend to see the map of the world in terms of power relations adumbrated largely, though certainly not exclusively, by the history of modern Empire. Whether we think of the globalized world in terms of (former) Western empires/non-Western colonies, Global North/South, Metropole/periphery, First/(former) Second/Third World, it appears ‘one but not equal’ and therefore riven with oppositional energies. Without necessarily eviscerating those oppositional energies or ignoring historical realities, might we find a way to acknowledge other global dynamics, ones that perhaps point to a less embattled future?”
Such an alternative global dynamic might be seen in the global sharing of patterns among hobbyists. Countless publications compile grid designs for the purpose of studying and sampling, and are interpreted through assorted perspectives and fields, including hobbyist pamphlets that are usually sought after by makers. These gridded charts for crafting turned up in books we found at the Healey Library, the Harvard Libraries, Boston Public Libraries and more.
This dynamic, at the heart of Electroknit Dymaxion, is a marked departure from the art-historical and postcolonial interest in origins and pathways of institutional and commercial circulation.
Gogineni notes:
“We are not provided with any clear itinerary for these knit patterns. Were they disseminated through the networks of Empire, or more idiosyncratic paths? Or are morphological similarities determined not by intercultural contact, but rather by similar contingent environmental constraints, or by elemental natural patterns observed? Mazza and Lattice20 do not presume to provide such theories or answers; they merely identify what they were able to discover in a limited timeframe in Boston-based archives, featuring hobbyist instructional manuals, samplers, and the like.”
Electroknit Dymaxion was installed on the Boston Harborwalk adjacent to JFK Library from July 9 - July 31. Pedestrian traffic viewed the textile interior through windows accessed by public walkway. The sun cast various triangular shadows on the inside, which had different effects in humidity, rain or oceanfront conditions. In early August, the interior of the sculpture traveled to the Corcoran in Washington DC as part of the Fast Fashion / Slow Art exhibition. In that installation the inner triangles are hung on a large wall in the shape of the two-dimensional dymaxion map.
Erica Imoisi of Lattice20, who did crucial work in the interior finishing, saw the work in both iterations of display: “Viewing the sculpture in two forms definitely expanded how available and open the project felt. In the wooden construct it had a bit of mystery that made it fun to interact with and focus on the designs. When viewed almost as an open concept at the Corcoran school, the work felt a bit more playful in a way where the viewer almost wants to inspect the actual labor that went into the project as well as viewing the similarities and differences in the motifs we had found and put together.”
The Now + There commissioned sculpture is now on view in the exhibition Fast Fashion / Slow Art at the Corcoran (through December 15, 2019) and will travel to Bowdoin College Museum of Art (on view January 30 - August 2, 2020). Members of Lattice20 are currently developing a web-based visualization with citations of each sampled motif.