STEGANOGRAPHIC TEXTILES

Ongoing series: collage, drawing, textile meshes, and mixed media

 

“To tell, we learn, as a transitive verb, means not only “to give a live account in speech or writing of events or facts” (that is, to tell a story) but also “to count things” (to tell a rosary, for example). The very nature of digital operations and telling thus coincide »

— Wolfgang Ernst, “Telling versus Counting? Media-Archaeological Point of View” in Digital Memory and the Archive.

 

Steganographic Textiles is an ongoing series emerging from research into historical, fictional, and speculative uses of textile practices to encode and conceal information. Accounts of messages embedded in patterns, stitches, colours, and structures circulate between historical documentation, anecdote, literature, and myth.

Steganography—the practice of concealing information in plain sight—offers a way of reconsidering textile structures as systems of inscription. Information may be materially present within them while remaining inaccessible, unnoticed, or unreadable.

Through collage, drawing, textile meshes, and processes of visual translation, the series explores the shifting boundary between pattern and code. Its configurations can be perceived as images, counted as sequences, approached as messages, or allowed to remain opaque. Rather than promising complete decipherment, the work examines how acts of reading, counting, and interpretation determine whether a material structure becomes legible as information.

Installation views from Wake Words, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, Austria, 2021
Photography by Markus Gradwohl and Marlies Pösch