Tanvi Ranjan

One of the four from the 'Technobiopgraphy' series, are knitted portraits of women in computing. These jacquard portraits break the tonality and appearance of classical style of portraits by using high-frequency colours of the digital and pixelated patterns to connect the traditional to the modern. Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian actress, collaboratively developed the system of frequency hopping on which the present age wireless communication is based. The work is as much a tribute to their contribution as it is an indication of textile and technology being an area of women's liberation. On the other hand, 'Frequencies' uses a knitting technique that morphs patterns by individually picking knitting needles on an industrial knitting machine. It explores the usage of data in studying patterns in order to create its own algorithm. In all the tapestries, patterns unfold the historic relationship of textiles being a craft usually associated with women, to women weaving the history of technology.

Artist Bio

Tanvi Ranjan (b. 1995, India) is a textile artist with a background in Knitwear Design and Technology, and is currently pursuing her Masters in Fine Art to bridge the two into her artistic practice. Her work explores subjects of human-machine relationship while elaborating on the techniques of textile making and the role in women in sculpting the future of digital and information age. By coding information into textile patterns, her works expand on the nature of patterns and noises in cybernetics and the ways in which textiles can decode modern technology and its interaction with humans. The artist identifies the overlapping histories of women, textiles, craft, and technology, and constantly stretches the boundaries of how we look at textiles from its simplest construction of weave or knit, to multi-dimensional jacquards.