An enquiry into how the intangible, emotional patternings that occur during the velvet hand-weaving process may be identified and externalised.

The act of weaving is shareable. A cloth’s construction can be reverse-engineered, a hand-drawn threading plan can be copied, a digitised weave structure can be transferred. Yet running as an invisible undercurrent is a non-transferable sequence of internalised, emotional experiences which occur during the process of weaving, known only to the weaver. Velvet Values seeks to bridge this separation between the act and the process by merging heritage velvet hand-weaving techniques with digitisation methods and tools. Through the development of new hand-woven velvet sensor cloth, modern conductive fibres are used in conjunction with traditional velvet-weaving to generate textiles which echo back their embedded intangible patterns.

Velvet Values is a three-year artistic research project by Emma Wood which is part of the DiGiTal Programme, and is funded by the Berliner Chancengleichheitsprogramme (BCP). The project is housed at the Wearable Computing department at the University of the Arts Berlin.