Today is the first time we assemble the carpet. After working almost a full year on this project, remote, and fragmented, it feels very rewarding to bring it all together.
A driver of UNAM, picks us (and the carpet) up and brings us to the site of UNAM. The space is great, a lot of students pass by, and we get the time to experiment with the composition of the carpets. The boxes are opened and for the first time we arrange the 107 carpets by year.
First we position them with some space in between (like the 3D-drawing of diederick Dewaere). VA always thought that this would be the best way to present Zea Mays, but now we realise that by leaving space in between them, the focus lies too much on the differences of each carpet (size, material, quality..) and become individual works. The carpet is made by 6 weavers, many of the parts are very divers in look, and feel. Once combined in one piece, this becomes a precious aspect of the work. Patricia, and Yessica who works for UNAM explain with the help of our flyer to passing students this multi-layered project that lies in front of us. Zea Mays becomes an important part in the narrative of G.ke, and builds further on this particular road taken by Various Artists.
The exhibition Human Mathematics shows the results of the eponymous workshop that was organised by Museo Textil and Various Artists in November 2014.
Various Artists developed the Human Mathematics workshop to share this creation method with other artists, or students. The workshop was led by Marcella.B and Martaque (who are part of the Various Artists collective), and consisted of a more theoretical and informative part (explaining the technique and going deeper into Human Mathematics examples by Various Artists) and a hands-on workshop where the participants were guided to make their own Human Mathematics piece.
Human Mathematics is an alternative artistic drawing methodology that serves to make abstract art using mathematics and data. Formal, factual, or personal information can be infused in design for drawings, textiles, or visual work using a set of rules created by the artist. These subjective rules are influenced by time, space, and the socio-economic context. The innovative aspect of Human Mathematics lies in its ability to render geometrical art human, complex, and unpredictable. It combines the abstract and the divine aspects of mathematics with the variables of data based statistics, integrating artistic or personal research data in a multi-layered visual artwork. This way the predictability of formula based mathematical arts, and the more informative aspects of data graphics, are neutralised into new forms of data visualisation.
Several Mexican artists working in the field of textiles were invited by the Museo Textil de Oaxaca to participate in the workshop in Oaxaca together with five Belgian students from the textile design department of KASK who travelled to Mexico in November 2014. During the production phase that followed, which lasted two months, all participants were invited to apply the Human Math technique to develop new works. The result is an exhibition with a diverse range of works directly or indirectly related to textile design which illustrate this method.
Opening Human Mathematics exhibiton – 21.02.2015
at Museo Textil de Oaxaca
Opening lecture at 18:00 by Various Artists and nadine
The exhibition runs until the beginning of June
coproduced by Various Artists, KASK and nadine
De reis werd ondersteund door het ministerie van Cultuur van de Vlaamse Gemeentschap.
RELATED 
