Crafted Logic, in collaboration with Ebru Kurbak, Stitching Worlds

“What if digital electronics emerged from textile handcrafts? How would technology be different if craftspeople were the catalyst to the electronics industry, via textiles manufacturing?”

Crafted Logic is part of a larger research into creating electronic components from scratch. The piece consists of fundamental logic gates that are created by various textile-crafting techniques. Each gate, being composed of handcrafted relays that can be controlled electromagnetically, is capable of performing a different logical operation.

In replicating the basis of digital electronics in novel forms and through unconventional materials, our intention is to imagine alternatives to existing realities of computational technologies. Crafted Logic is a speculative artifact and process as means to reflect on the creation of digital systems that surround us, as well as on how this shapes our interaction with them.

Logic Gates are the building blocks of digital electronics. As idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logic gate performs a logical operation on one or more logical inputs, and produces a single logical output. Every single digital device operates on some combination of the basic logic functions AND, OR and NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR and XNOR; even the most complex circuit can be reduced to them in the final analysis.

In its function, Crafted Logic exemplifies the possibility to replicate a computer through the skills and materials embedded in the cultures of needlecrafts. In its appearance, in shifting the materials, skills and processes needed to create a basic logic function, it potentially opens new doors of thinking in diverse ways about the making of and interacting with computational systems. It challenges the aesthetics, interactions and technology creation scenarios we take for granted in the field today.

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Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak. 2016. CRAFTED LOGIC Towards Hand-Crafting a Computer. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3881-3884.

INTER/ACTION: Digital Art That Responds. May 9 – May 22 2016. Works Gallery, San Jose, USA.

LABORO ERGO SUM: amber’15 Art and Technology Festival. November 6 – November 15 2015. SantralIstanbul Energy Museum, Istanbul, TR

eTextile Cuvée 2015. July 28 – August 1 2015. Paillard Centre d’Art Contemporain, Poncé Sur Le Loir, FR.