CARRIE MAE ROSE

The Computational Fashion Fellowship at Eyebeam was groundbreaking. This interview below was a culmination of a three-year journey working with a team to build a bridge between two NYC industries, Silicon Alley and the Garment District in NYC, funded by the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund Grant at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center. The fashion industry cares about the highest level of elegance, refinement and beauty while Silicon Alley is very focused on tech innovations often with very little aesthetic appeal.

This 2 year fellowship focused specifically on the collaborations between artists and scientists to discover new ways to blend innovation and beauty. I was well-funded for 1 year of creative research and collaboration with a NYC based scientist. I chose to work with professor and battery expert Dr. Dan Steingart. We met monthly to discuss ideas and experiment with battery designs that could be integrated into the filament of 3D printed forms to bring power for illumination. My final exhibition was a poetic expression of the crystalline form of silica that grows with tetrahedral molecular geometry.

WHAT IS THE CONCEPT BEHIND THIS SERIES OF WORKS?

The concept being explored with the Light As A Feather - Bodycrown Series has multiple layers. They are representing the empty form of a crystallized structure that is exploring the non-physical energetic circulations that begin in the heart, similar to the nadis of Ayurvedic Medicine and the meridians in Chinese medicine. These circulations around the human body and field are part of a subtle body system that Rudolf Steiner calls the Four Fold Model. I am researching & understanding how we can help human physiology transition to living in the extreme environment of space stations and during space travel. I believes that we will need angelic help in this transition of human living in space. These wings symbolize the transition of becoming lighter, more free and yet more structured at same time. The nano and molecular structure that underlies much of the mineral realm is made of the platonic solid of the tetrahedron and so the wings mimic the mineral structure in an abstracted way.

HOW DID YOU FIRST DEVELOP THE TETRAHEDRON WINGS SERIES?

This series of structures are built from tetradehrons that were printed from a MakerBot 3D machine with PLA corn plastics. They were first drawn in Maya and are able to be scaled in size from very tiny to extremely large. I was concurrently built actual 3D printed models of wings with the help of a brilliant intern, Rui Hu, and a series of art prints that were vector drawings. These prints were exploring how to blend together the form of tetrahedrons with wings. The first explorations in Maya were to create the individual tetrahedron file to be printed with the MakerBot. We tested the options of printing out sections of wings, but it became clear that the assembly was best left after the objects had been printed.