&

Cathy Hsiao navigates between contemporary digital methods and ancient weaving techniques by developing a hybrid language through freeform Jacquard weavings.  She links the auditory, tactile, and visual senses by creating patterns drawn from recoded sound waveforms.

 

In our interview, we recorded our voices, created and played sounds for each other, and captured video of the guestures of our hands while we talked.  Still in progress, the format of this interview will be selections for sound clips of our voices, with the soundwave of Cathy's voice on one half paired with the soundwave of my voice on the other half.  Within these wave-forms, cut in wood, will be an engraving of the most ruminative questions brought up in our converstaion.  Namely:

 

• What does it mean to talk to something that doesn’t speak back?  How can mute objects speak?  Can the sound of someone’s attention be captured?

• What is wild? What can’t be captured?  How might we take experiences and trying to make structures out of them, making the immaterial part of material culture?

• Thinking like an artist means to be in love with the world and moved by powerful emotive experiences,  It means that one does not have to be correct, one can approach the exotic and primal.

• How do artists foster a translation between inner and outer life?  Through a primordial gestalt, being an interloper and cognitively assessing one’s entry point into the world.

 

In-progress images below show prototypes of CNC laser-cut soundwaves and a visualization of the intended engraving on plexiglas: