Memory Circuits

This ongoing series of small circuit embroideries originated in early 2013, as I contemplated the visual beauty, logic, and complexity of the circuit schematic for a 48-channel digital mixing console. I came into contact with this schematic (a few hundred pages long in total) working as a audio technician.

The chosen schematics for the embroideries involve the main CPU circuits, the 'brain' of the mixer. Highly complex integrated circuits (chips), are seen as blank space from which multiple legs of signal emerge.

Process

As with most textile work, the process involved a laboured logic of counting and repetition. The motion of directing thread in and out incidentally replicated the binary logic of on/off, invoking machine function but on a painstakingly slow, bumbling, and imprecise human scale. I've always found electronics and textiles intrinsically connected in terms of their embodied labour, materiality, pattern, logic, and memory.

In 2016, after exhibiting the small round embroideries in various galleries, I began a series of full-page circuits that covered a much larger area of fabric (approx half a square metre). The designs were from the same digital mixer schematic diagram. These took a significantly longer amount of time to sew, and required much preparation, planning, and (most of all) counting to transpose the circuit from the page to the fabric.

Exhibition

Three small round embroideries where exhibited alongside three large-scale square embroideries.