Mini-symposium „Light, Textile and Colour Matter“

Barbro Scholz is a designer (BA, MFA) and research assistant in textile design (Textile Printing and Finishing Laboratory) at HAW Hamburg, conducting research with a focus on electronic textiles and interaction. She is interested in the influence of design on society, especially textiles as user interfaces for technical or stand-alone devices.

Barbro is currently investigating the possibilities of using light as material on the body. Her work addresses light as an extension of the body, as opposed to textile material being separated from the immateriality of light and code. Another aspect of her exploration is the social impacts of worn light.

Sandra De Berduccy, known as aruma, is a new media artist, weaver and independent researcher from Bolivia. Aruma works with textile as technology, exploring the relationship nature, processes of traditional Andean weaving, and the languages of new media and electronics. She has carried out research on traditional textile techniques of the American continent, especially of Andean and pre-Columbian textiles, for nearly two decades. This work has lead her to understand the Andean loom as a thinking machine, with a logic that offers a very wide range of possibilities, a model of flexible order to which we are able to treat as collective memory. In each of Aruma’s works, woven in Andean looms including various contemporary technologies, she proposes a form of continuity of the millennial textile culture that is currently developing in Andean lands, of which she considers herself a part.
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Alex Börner is a fashion and costume designer and educator, who is interested in connecting body, movement, light & video projection in fashion contexts. Her work deals in particular with cross-overs of analogue and digital tools and forms of expression.

Alex works as an artistic assistant at the Institute of Experimental Fashion and Textile Design at Berlin University of the Arts. After completing her training as a tailor for womenswear, Alexandra Börner studied fashion design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art in Halle. After finishing her master in 2017, she founded Super Health Studios. Since then she has been involved in numerous collaborations with artists, fashion designers and dancers.
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Sara Robertson leads the specialism Soft Systems: Smart Surfaces, Structures and Digital Assemblies within the MA Textiles programme at Royal College of Art. Prior to joining the RCA Sara was Programme Director for Textiles and Lecturer in Craft Innovation and Smart Materials at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. She completed her PhD at Heriot Watt University’s, School of Textiles and Design in 2011, on the design and application of smart materials for textiles.
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Sarah Taylor works as a senior research fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, and is a design practitioner and researcher with expertise in the area of smart, light-emitting textiles. Since her pioneering research investigating the properties of fibre optics for application within woven textile structures (1995) she has continued to innovate through the use of optical fibre, digital technologies and textile practice.
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