The Museum of Lost Technology

This project investigates textiles in the art and technology context. The aim of the project is to challenge expectations that are brought by terms such as media arts and tech-arts, and explore the position of womens work in contemporary technology-engaged art frameworks. The project places a practice-based, creative, and interdisciplinary mode of studio enquiry at its center and intentionally seeks for new and original understandings of textiles as technology, beyond the existing electronic textiles and wearable technology applications. The creative studio enquiry is aimed at researching and revealing implications of the past societal gendering of material practices. In the Western world, not only women but also particular knowledge that had been dominantly held by women had been excluded from official sites of science and technology research for centuries. By carrying out hands-on experiments at the intersections of textiles and selected scientific subjects, the project excavates some of the speculative lost possibilities that were unimaginable in the past due to the gendered social and spatial segregation of knowledge. Directed towards establishing a spec ulative museum of technology, the studio enquiry searches for an imaginative collection of information, techniques, and technologies that could have been conceivedbut never were. The museum, here, is understood and explored as a site where truth is produced through the sorting of objects, knowledge and practices. The four-year arts-based research project establishes the lab as method. The studio environment of the project is intentionally set for open-ended and open-minded material investigation that acknowledges the agency of materials and material processes. Every year, a new theme is established by pairing an extra-disciplinary research field such as biotechnology, mathematics, physics, and economics, with a particular textiles crafting method such as natural dyeing, embroidery, lace making, and patchwork. Each year, the studio is rearranged and re- equipped according to the selected thematic pair and prepared as the locale for situated material enquiry. The practice-based experiments in the studio are supported by art theoretical research, comparative studies of various histories that are relevant to the project, comparative surveys of collections of selected anthropology and technology museums, as well as creative writing and world-building activities. Research residencies are regularly carried out at the international cooperating institutions to stimulate further reflection on the project within an interdisciplinary and international network of key experts. The project is carried out by Ebru Kurbak at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.