Friday, 22/01/2010 by StefaniaMarket

Wear the Intangible

trikoton

Every season Berlin’s Trade Show Premium welcomes in its “Gästezimmer“ new interesting projects mostly based on experimental brands. This year the space was dedicated to Berlin-based young designers. Between several European cutting-edge brands, two young German girls stood out and immediately grabbed my attention, with the presentation of quite an extreme project: a marriage of fashion and design. These two girls are creating unique textiles by generating patterns using their customer’s voice frequencies…

Inspired by the post-structuralist theories of the American writer Paul Auster about the importance of “words and language” and the way we perceive the world, Hanna Wiesener and Magdalena Kohler conceived Trikoton, a fashion label which focuses on products as forms of self-expression.

“How does it feel when your sweater becomes a medium of your own voice?”- They ask, in a provocative way…

Magdalena Kohler has recently completed a degree in Fashion Design at the University of the Arts Berlin, while Hanna Wiesener has brought her background in design (she studied at the same University but did Product Design). Together they worked on their first project in 2007, and since have been continuously developing their knowledge about patterns and yarn for the Trikoton Collection.

Their collaboration began at the Ars Electronica festival where the two designers presented Gelsomina, the Voice Knitting Machine: using an old mechanical knitting machine from the 1970s and a microcontroller with 24 small engines, they showed how inputs of voice signals processed via computer could interact with the machine by imitating pattern cards.

The working system is based on converting the frequency bands of an audio message into binary codes for knitting patterns and together with a German knitting company, they came up with a parametrical knitting web application to produce fashion pieces via the web: the pieces are totally unique since the human voice is unique. Observing relations between man and machine, they discovered how they could record and reproduce the human voice and quickly turn it into patterns, creating a surprising ‘aesthetic’ of voice- recording.

Simple yet stylish, the collection features basic items for both men and women, such as bright pastel sweaters, leggings and scarf, all available online together with a web-based application that allows you to transfer a spoken message directly onto the purchased item: Meaning that the jersey used for the garments becomes the storage medium of one’s identity.

This interdisciplinary project explores new ways of interactive creation and manufacturing processes to produce items that could easily be associated with art installation. Conceptual? Yes, but don’t we crave limited unique in this era of mass-production? What is, in the end, more individual and distinctive than the human voice beside a human fingerprint?

The Berlin based progressive company is currently working with local manufacturers, to bring together both traditional and new technologies, providing high quality products with the support of the department of Economics and Technology.

“So, this is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment and die. Strange, is it not?”
(From City of Glass, New York Trilogy by Paul Auster)

www.trikoton.com

Photo credit: Samantha Garfield