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EJTECH

“Textiles are the smallest habitats. They act like membranes [and] can give you a totally different somatic experience.”

Ejtech textile art

Drape No. X – Draping the Chthulucene

Budapest, Hungary. 2021

negative woven textile

014

Draping Sound 

Installation / Performance view at DOCK20, Lustenau, Austria – 2019

20 channel textile sound system – sublimation ink print, negative weaving, high performance textile, galvanized textile, conch shell synthesizer, metal structure, neodymium magnets, light tubes, custom electronics, software

041

Drape No. II – Draping the Chthulucene

Budapest, Hungary. 2021

negative woven textile

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Drape No. V – Draping the Chthulucene

Budapest, Hungary. 2021

negative woven textile

Ejtech textiles and music

Draping Sound 

Installation / Performance view at DOCK20, Lustenau, Austria – 2019

20 channel textile sound system – sublimation ink print, negative weaving, high performance textile, galvanized textile, conch shell synthesizer, metal structure, neodymium magnets, light tubes, custom electronics, software

EJTECH

All Direction is Curved, All Motion is Spiral (detail)

Installation view at Easttopics Gallery, Budapest, Hungary – 2019

Unit of multichannel textile sound system – negative weaving, high performance textile, galvanized textile, metal structure, chains, neodymium magnets, custom electronics, software

EJTECH [ˈeɪtɛk’] is Judit Eszter Karpati a PhD textile artist from Hungary and Esteban de la Torre a media and sound artist from Mexico. They are currently based in Budapest, Hungary and have a polydisciplinary studio that incorporates textiles with ‘sound, space, light and time to analyse the process of unfolding patterns between technology and the human body.’

  

Tell me about your work.

EJTECH is a polydisciplinary studio working with hyperphysical interfaces, programmable matter, and augmented textiles as media to investigate sensorial and conceptual relationships between subject and object, aiming to rediscover networks of emerging structures and immanent causality within realist metamaterialism. Sound, space, light and time as material building blocks are paramount elements in their practice, analyzing the process of unfolding patterns between technology and the human body. Driven by material research, resulting in performative installations, multichannel sonic sculptures and dynamic surfaces. Influenced by the philosophy of New Materialism, Holonic Theory and Somaesthetics, EJTECH aims to provide tools for exploring liminality, and the elusive state of now.

 

Our work has been presented in galleries, festivals and exhibitions such as Japan Media Arts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Budapest Kunsthalle, Sensorium Festival, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Design Museum Holon, Trafo House of Contemporary Arts, Dutch Design Week, Milan Design Week, Dock 20 Gallery, Horizont Gallery, LOM Art Space, iii Instrument Inventors Initiative and many more. 

 

EJTECH has created commissioned art pieces for cultural institutions and commercial brands such as DIOR, Blade Runner 2049, Material ConneXion and Telekom. 

We regularly hold workshops and lectures on new media art and creative technology internationally. 

 

Why and how do you incorporate textiles into your work?

Textiles are self-signifying media that string macrocosm and microcosm together, the emerging pattern of senses woven into a cognitive fabric, the interlinkage of vertices and edges to create an immanent network, our second skin and the next generation interface for human-computer interaction. 

 

“Tissue, textile and fabric are excellent models of knowledge, whereby knowledge can be understood as a perceptual experience.”- Michael Serres.

 

Textiles are the smallest habitats. They act like membranes. Membranes can separate you or involve you in something. Textiles aren’t just home textiles or clothes but you can think of them in a totally different way. Textile wraps around you just like the universe wraps around you. When it comes to the experience of reality, it is interwoven with sensorial experiences. It becomes a fabric you create from your experiences, your sensorial system, how it’s interacting with the outside world. Textile is one of the most important building elements, besides wood or stone. It can give you a totally different somatic experience. Besides that, textiles are excellent modes of knowledge, but these bits of knowledge are understood as a perceptual experience. Textile is a very nice metaphor to describe our work. For example, we use many expressions that are very much connected to textile but are used in our everyday life. The fabric of reality, for example.

 

The multichannel sound system ‘Phase In, Phase Out’, recontextualizes textile into a next generation interface, exploring the vibrancy of matter via the physical force of sound. Composition focused on corporeal hearing produces sonic spatial models that unfold as invisible geometries throughout the space. In the exhibition ‘All Direction is Curved, All Motion is Spiral’, the duo further segments sonorous phenomena, by draping the sound system across the gallery’s rooms, inciting the visitor into active, positional listening. Their work with spatiotemporal compositions and the importance given to the role of sound on, and inside the body, evokes the practice of architect Bernhard Leitner’s sound-space objects.

 

Do you have any exciting plans or exhibitions coming up?

Currently working and developing “GENERAL MAGIC”, a new workflow involving textile as a dynamic soft-image medium. This piece has iterations as a self-painting canvas using AI as an installation or a quadrophonic sound performance. “GENERAL MAGIC”is inspired by the work of Dora Maurer and Manfred Mohr, exploring time as a geometric shape and the interpolation and transmutation between states. We are preparing a performance with this quad setup at bb15 Space for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria.

We are very extited to be performing “Thirdspace” on our octagonal textile sound system at CyFest in Saint Petersburg, Russia this Autumn.

LRRH_ commissioned us for a large scale installation at their beautiful space in Dusseldorf, Germany, to be unveiled in 2022. 

Recently we have been documenting our series of draping studies on the Chthulucene . These are sculptural textile works, crafted by negative weaving, representing concepts and reaches on aspects of Donna Haraway’s writings. “Tentacular thinking” resonates with us, and we find textile, specially the negative weaving technique, very prone and efficient to understand and tactually exemplify such ideas. 

 

Is there anything you would like to add?

In the past year, we were invited to become part of MOME – IK (Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design – Innovation Center), a new branch of the university dealing with academic research. Within this canopy we founded Soft Interfaces Lab. This is a great opportunity for us to extend our practice and research into reaches that do not necessarily fit the EJTECH scope. Currently we are involved in exploring active matter and auscultating non-human intelligence, working with slime mold and data gardening, constructing techno-organic system exploring our communication and interaction with plant entities as partners/collaborators.  

 

https://ejtech.studio/

https://www.instagram.com/ejtech.cc/