Chloe Bensahel
2023-24 CAST Visiting Artist
Exploring smart textiles: weaving memory through innovation
About the Project
Zach Lieberman and the MIT Media Lab Future Sketches group hosts CAST Visiting Artist Chloe Bensahel to conduct new research around textile and memory, building on MIT’s legacy as the first place to weave memory technologies.
Chloe Bensahel’s practice considers textiles to be containers of information, carrying language, stories, and belief systems woven in by the human mind. Her recent work uses conductive thread technologies to create textiles that can “speak” their own stories through elements like sound and light. At MIT, Bensahel will dive into historical innovations that harnessed textiles as potent forms of code in order to create new memory technologies using traditional textile techniques.
Bensahel will lead a textile workshop and collaborate with a community of artists and research scientists shaping the future of textiles at the MIT Media Lab and in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT.
Schedule
Upcoming Events
Workshop / Public Presentation
Spring 2024
Details forthcoming
Biography
Rooted in textiles, performance, and installation, CAST Visiting Artist Chloe Bensahel’s work addresses the relationship between narrative and material, text, and textile. Inspired by her own intergenerational history of migration (Algeria, Morocco, France, USA), she examines how materials carry stories the way bodies do, sometimes covertly as embodied or coded language.
Website: chloebensahel.com
Social: Instagram
Collaborators at MIT
Zach Lieberman, Adjunct Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and leader of the Future Sketches Group, is an artist, researcher, and educator who creates opportunities for surprise. His performances and installations amplify human gestures—by making drawings come to life, imagining what the sound of a voice might look like, or transforming people’s silhouettes into music.
Biography: MIT Media Lab
Website: zach.li
Social: Instagram | YouTube
With a background in embedded systems, MIT Media Lab Research Assistant Cedric Honnet explores the connections between physical computing, interactivity, and the arts by traveling the world to research labs and hackerspaces. He has worked on open-source projects, such as interactive art pieces, eTextile music controllers, augmented immersive systems, modular implants, and 3D positioning systems.
Biography: MIT Media Lab
Website: honnet.eu
Social: Instagram
Research Assistant Ozgun Kilic Afsar is a design engineer and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher with a curiosity to deconstruct and understand how things move. She currently explores robotic interfaces, studying motor skill acquisition, skill transfer, and the symbiotic relationship between the body and the on-body interface that adapt to one another over time.
Biography: MIT Media Lab
Website: ozgunkilic.com
Social: Instagram
Artist and architectural historian, Azra Akšamija is the Director of the MIT Future Heritage Lab, an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, and the Director of the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT.
In her multidisciplinary work, Akšamija investigates the politics of identity and memory. Her projects explore creative responses to conflict and crisis, and provide a framework for analyzing and intervening in contested sociopolitical realities.
Biography: Art, Culture & Technology Program at MIT
Website: azraaksamija.net and futureheritagelab.com
Technical support:
Jesse Jur, Director of Technical Program Development at Advanced Functional Fabrics of America
Frannie Logan, Textile Technologist at Advanced Functional Fabrics of America
Supported by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and co-presented with the Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT and the MIT Media Lab.
