Melanie Olde

My work explores the emergence resulting from creating woven artworks using plant growth algorithms. Within the ecosystem that includes nature and human technology, I am interested in exploring, through weaving, questions of how to understand complex natural systems, how human technology creates the “artificial” and how we might understand our connections to these by making hybridized art forms. How can humans reconcile their evolved need to innovate technologically while retaining connections to the natural, wild ecology? I use computer processing and weaving as media to explore this concept, bridging millennia-old with contemporary technologies while drawing analogies between complexity in cloth and complex plant systems. Emergence occurs from complex systems of myriad entities acting individually to create unexpected outcomes. My emergence is grown from the material, the structure, the coding, the plant, and the hundreds of thousands of woven binding points unified in an unanticipated whole, something that is almost-life.