Eindhoven – Designer Bart Hess has set up a temporary factory at Dutch Design Week where visitors can make futuristic textiles through a crowdsourced production process.
The project, Work With Me People, produces textiles that are so complex and random that the line between organic form and mass quantities of digital data becomes blurred. The results look like crocodile skins, metallic fur, or in the designer’s words, ‘an alien that’s been shot’.
Rather than trying to standardise the process, Hess celebrates the quirks in individual technique. ‘I asked people to put latex dots on a latex textile,’ he tells LS:N Global. ‘That is a simple job, but everybody executes it differently. So although it’s the same process you get a random feeling that you can’t really produce by machine.’ The textiles will later be used in fashion shoots, designer collections and Hess’s own projects.
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