Intimate Textiles

Ingrid Bachmann

Textiles are one of the most intimate of materials. We wear them, sleep between them, carry our goods and our often our memories, in them. Recent innovations in industrial textiles and in the growing field of bio-materials challenge this intimacy in interesting ways. These developments provoke some interesting, and occasionally disturbing, observations and implications of our understanding and conception of the body and our complex relationship to human, animal and machine life.

In this paper, I will present the results of a research trip to a number of leading scientific laboratories in the eastern United States that specialize in advanced textile technologies. They invoke both fairytale and sci-fi wonders and horrors; Rumplestiltskin spinning straw into gold, spiders spinning silk, woven gold antennas and sutured pig parts.

Industrial textiles and bio materials provide a fascinating field that touches on many questions – questions of boundaries between human/animals/machine/ organisms as well as ethical questions on what constitutes our notions of natural and unnatural. The French philosopher Michel Serres suggests that humanity should make a new nature contract to replace the old outdated social contract. Perhaps this contract could be one of integration rather than subjugation. As many scientists are increasingly becoming farmers and developments in bio materials, biomechanics and reproductive technologies suggest a new relationship to nature is needed, one in which there is no radical separation of nature and society rather than the current view of nature as an exploitable resource for the benefit of human life alone.

 

 

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