Millenia - the Zeitgeist of Technology

Millenia - the Zeitgeist of Technology

Elisa Martignoni

@eliselaurence

Elisa Martignoni designs tapestries that represent the Zeitgeist - the essence of a specific period in time – of the so called Millenia. The carefully woven jacquard tapestries, fabricated according to Martignoni ´s ideas by an renowned Italian manufacturer, explore images from the 1990/2000s to present times. They are depicting the fast development of the technological world and how this emerged in our daily life; not only forming the way in which we perceive modern times society, but also having had a direct strong impact on us as teenagers or young adults.

The question appears of how you can intertwine the thousand year old traditional technology of weaving into a modern times realm or better how can you transform it to a transmitter of the digital world? 

When we take a look back in history then we notice that the first computer was actually a loom. The technique of weaving is based on 010101, which traces knowledge, a code, into textile. „Textiles, historically the preserve of women, predate architecture. Plaids may encode calendars. The first clay figures found in Turkey and the Balkans wear fringed kilts whose knots,..., may be records, journals, messages – or spells.“

The project of Elisa Martignoni analyses symbols and pop images from the beginning of the new century and gets its inspiration from video games, cassette tapes to recent technology, when it aims to create another layer of perception in the Virtual Reality. What are the potential consequences of these advancing technologies? How do they form the human perspective of the world?

Elisa Martignoni has accomplished to contrast a tangible past to an increasingly intangible present, “making the untouchable touchable and creating nonexisting spaces."