Soft Data and Commons Wares Residency: An Archive of Witch Fever by Xiaowei Wang
installation of An Archive of Witch Fever, slash art gallery San Francisco, 2024. photo courtesy of slash art gallery
What forms of technology and computation will survive the salt water of the ocean, the torrent of a typhoon, the salt water of our tears? Using a mode of queer computation as survival and world making, I began my residency at DXArts Softlab/Studio Tilt with the intention of working on my project, An Archive of Witch fever — experimenting with conductive thread made of stainless steel to make repairs to work clothing, and continuing work on a series of textile pieces modeled after plantation worker clothing circa 1880, printed with a speculative botany of different flowers. These speculative botany patterns are made with an out of the box neural network and fed archival images of colonial plantations across the Pacific ocean circa 1900, particularly across Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, particularly the region known as “Oceania”. The embroidery using conductive thread is magnetized and encoded with 0’s and 1’s, using techniques based on Justin Chan and Shyamnath Gollakota’s research paper.
The project is a culmination of 2 years of research, thinking and experimentation on themes of climate crisis, labor, and transpacific migration. However, I hadn’t had time to fully be in a place and be focused on the project for some time, until I got to Seattle in May 2024 for my Soft Data & Common Wares artist residency. I started my residency at DXArts Softlab/Studio Tilt with an artist talk and lots of ideas. It was clear to me from the beginning that the residency at DXArts Softlab/Studio Tilt was going to be special. It immediately felt like an incredible alignment of interlocutors, a deeply supportive environment that encouraged curiosity, dialogue and deep focus, as well as DXArts Softlab providing a lot of working space, equipment and supplies, and most importantly, feedback on my project. While my project, An Archive of Witch Fever, was also part of the Eyebeam 2024 Fellowship cohort, up until then, all of my conversations about the project had been online or over Zoom. Being in the DXArts Softlab/Studio Tilt Design space highlighted how much being in a place can bring a project or work to a new level, and how nothing can truly replace in-person conversation and exchange.
During my time at the residency, I attended an AM transmitter workshop held by APO33, an interdisciplinary European artist collective that use free software. This experience transformed the direction of my project in a way that I could never have anticipated, and I began to experiment with the conductive thread embroidery patterns as transmission antennae.
Towards the end of my residency I was lucky to participate in a group show put together by the DXArts grads at the Greenhouse on campus.
Magnetized embroidery patterns that read N(0) or S(1) — the 0’s and 1’s are based on polarity of the conductive thread.
Early experiments with the conductive embroidery as antennae.
After my residency, I continued working on An Archive of Witch Fever, towards a group gallery show at slash art gallery in September 2024. One of the questions others brought up at my artist talk and in feedback sessions was how people could ‘read’ the encoded binary in the embroidery patterns. After having the time and space in Seattle to think about things, I asked a friend, David Rios at NYU ITP to design and fabricate a sensing device that would vibrate accordingly depending on if the sensor was hovering over a 0 or 1. This was put into a clay rock enclosure I made, and placed on the ground in the gallery showing of An Archive of Witch Fever. What I learned about transmission antennae and AM transmitter building continued on in the work, and for the September gallery show, I created an antenna made of woven conductive thread nets and human hair, broadcasting old work songs from transpacific colonial plantations, alongside field recordings of sugar cane plantations. Prior to the residency I had been curious about radio, but being in Seattle, it felt truly magical that I got to do a workshop building an AM transmitter and learn more about radio waves and spectra.
Artist statement for An Archive of Witch Fever at slash art gallery: “What forms of technology and computation will survive the salt water of the ocean, the salt water of our tears? For this piece, through textiles patterned with a speculative botany and conductive thread nets and embroidery, I explore intimate geographies and the practice of queer computation as a mode of survival and world making despite imperial science and its residue. There is a vessel to tune in: human hair and conductive fishing nets that transmit songs and story through AM radio. Its counterpart: imperial science that makes models and diagrams to be the entire world, relying on expeditions, collecting and cataloguing. On the ground, clothing from oceanic passages and migration, patterned with a speculative botany created using machine learning from British botanical illustrations and archival images of trans-Pacific plantations in the 1900s. The conductive thread embroidery is magnetized and encoded with binary information, as a form of embodied, soft data storage. An archive as practice for the future and forgetting, waves of information and waves of migration, electromagnetic waves that pass through us, waves that we absorb, waves that we transmit.”
