500 LEDs Bring an Interactive Textile to Life
Fabric can be so much more than just the materials we use to keep ourselves clothed and warm. Fabric can be alive. And 29-year-old Swedish textile designer Malin Bobeck is an artist who breathes life into fabric. We last covered her work while she was still a student at the Swedish School of Textiles, weaving glowing fabrics with optical fibers.
Her work still focuses on bringing light and life to textiles, but her latest project is on a much grander scale. Those Who Affected Me is an interactive light installation currently on view at the Gothenburg Museum of Art. 500 programmable LEDs light up the textile, which is responsive to visitors’ touch. “Textile is a material that almost all human beings have closest to their skin nearly all hours of the day,” writes Bobeck. “People are so used to interacting with it and I want to encourage that in my art. Have people touching, squishing, and playing around with it instead of being a “hands off” installation.”
“The last year I’ve been developing my textiles towards integrating more functions by connecting them to microcontrollers,” Bobeck tells The Creators Project. “The origin and inspiration is the material itself: conductive yarn, optical fiber or shrinking yarn, but by adding electronics and programing the possibilities are endless. The next step for me is to research the possibilities to make my art mobile, to be able to put it on a body as a light emitting wearable art piece. In that way the person wearing it can experience my art from the inside.”
