The MetaLoom is a project conceived in the spirit of collaboration at
the convergence of weaving and architecture. It is a project about invention, creation and community as core constituents
of human culture, a response to the disaffections of consumerism and spectacle, and a reassertion of the individual’s
role in and contribution to society. A space and mechanism of communal effort, facilitating and amplifying the engagement
of our bodies with built form and the process of constructing, the MetaLoom is performance, sculpture and device for making
art.
2009 Sweetport Art and Music Festival, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Evoking the heavy timber construction
of New England mill buildings and the looms of Herman Melville’s description “A Bower in the Arsacides”
in Moby-Dick, the
first iteration of the Metaloom is a 12’H x 16’W x 5’D two harness weaving loom constructed of lumber (mostly
fir) and metal hardware, comprising a warp as ruled surface between two discontinuous, oppositely curved beams suspended within
a rectilinear frame. This Metaloom is an expression and exploration of community --and our fundamental shared humanity--
through a project combining weaving traditions with architectural considerations at a scale capable of activating public space.
Designed specifically for a public, interactive installation at Webster Hall in New York City, but with the flexibility to
be exhibited elsewhere, the Metaloom is of a collective scale, requiring group effort to construct as well as operate. At
the scale of architecture, the space and operation of the loom fully engage the body of the weaving participant. To operate
the Metaloom, participants must step into it, and into the fold of the warp, the weight of their bodies depressing the treadles
which constitute the floor of the space, shifting the harnesses overhead which, with a dramatic swish, flip the shed of the
continuous vertical warp. You must insert your hands into the space of the shed to pass the shuttle. There is no beater so
you must use your fingers as combs to compact the weft. Portions of the loom are so wide that a single individual cannot weave
on it; you must pass the shuttle to a companion to continue, from one end to the other, back and forth. You can stroll along
the warp inside the loom, running your hand over the threads as if playing a harp. To encourage the broadest range of participation,
two of the six treadles are designed wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. The piece is important not so much in the way
it refers to competing notions of the origins of space making –timber frame or woven surface? Laugier or Semper?—but
in the way it engages the participant in the collaborative creation and utilization of space, of literal and metaphorical
shelter, employing fundamental technologies so widespread and ancient as to constitute material analogies to Carl Jung’s
“collective unconsciousness.” The Metaloom guides us away from the misconception that these technologies, through
their associations with pre-industrial culture, are somehow non-technological and therefore “natural,” while seeking
to reaffirm the mytho-poetic status of a domesticated technology which was once so pervasive and important that it represented
both a way of life and a metaphor for living. The intended weft of the Metaloom is decidedly post-industrial: film from home
movies, old home video tapes superseded by DVD, cassette tapes of favorite music kept for sentimental reasons, shredded or
unraveled clothing…mass-produced threads which once situated individual identity within the collective, recycled as
individual contributions to a post-consumer work of communal art.
Textile Arts Center,
New York.
The MetaLoom is an ontological
machine, providing a powerful physical metaphor for the integration of cyclical and linear time within a folded, constantly
becoming boundary of space.
"Creative Block", Webster Hall, New York City, as part of the
2009 Obie Awards celebration.
MetaLoom installations done in collaboration
with Textile Art Center, NY.
