Hilanderia

Hilanderia is Spanish for spinning, and it was exactly this process that Sara Diaz Rodriguez wanted to interpret anew in her MA Textile and Surface Design project of the same name. After previously developing a digital Ikat-Printer, her interest had already been sparked to take classic textile processes and manipulate them using new technologies.
‚Hilanderia‘ deals with the manipulation of garn production and the resulting patterned textiles, a textural interpretation of the traditional Ikat technique. Instead of dyeing the
yarns, the three-dimensional pattern arises from the variation in yarn thickness. Instead of focusing on a textile finishing process, Diaz chose to go back further in ‚Hilanderia‘ to the yarn production. A fabric assumes its form and character based on how its yarns have
been designed and manipulated. The appearance of the fabric is determined by the composition of its yarns. In the project ‘Hilanderia’, digital media support the analogue processes of fabric design, and bring regularity to the irregularity of the spun yarn. From a hand-made machine, a slub yarn is produced, whose thickness is controlled by a digital program written by Diaz herself. Nevertheless the result is still influenced by the properties of the chosen fibre, (primarily sheep‘s wool, but also experimental materials such as steel wool). The knitted or woven textile made from the digitally-coded yarn carries the “information” embedded through the spinning process; an individual pattern is created according to the width of the finished fabric.

The project was also inspired by the parallels between weaving and information technology: both are systems based on binary codes, which therefore enables the transmission of information between the two mediums.