Episode 137: Entangling Craft and Tech with Shanel Wu

Tablet Weaving - Shanel is demonstrating tablet weaving at a research showcase for human-computer interaction and information science.

 

Vest Pocket - a detail shot of the handwoven vest, focusing on the built-in pocket (which is holding a small potted plant) and the overshot patterning on the fabric in green and yellow wool, on a brown and white ground fabric. 

Transcript

Sarah Resnick: I’m Sarah Resnick.

LaChaun Moore: And I’m LaChaun Moore.

Sarah Resnick: And we are the hosts of the Weave Podcast, a project of the weaving yarn shop, GIST Yarn & Fiber.

LaChaun Moore: Hello. Hi, everyone. I hope all is well. In this week’s episode, I’m speaking with Shanel Wu. Shanel is a Taiwanese-American, nonbinary, queer maker who uses their fiber skills to entangle craft and tech. Shanel is pursuing a Ph.D in Creative Technology Design at ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, and we’re lucky to have Shanel on the podcast this week. Hello, Shanel. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Shanel Wu: Hi. Yeah, it’s great to be on here. So, I’m Shanel Wu. I also go by S. And I am an all-around crafter. I guess I’ll start with where I am now. I am currently on the stolen lands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples, also known as Boulder, Colorado, and I’m currently a Ph.D student here working on research in human-computer interaction, but specifically smart textiles design, which is why I’m kind of like around this bubble. And how I got here is kind of a meandering story, but overall, I’m a nonbinary Han Taiwanese person with ADHD, so a lot of… pardon my tangents and wandering and stuff.

LaChaun Moore: It’s not a tangent. No worries. Thank you for being open and sharing.

Shanel Wu: Yeah, of course. I’m really conscious of how all of these identities shape every part of my existence. So, yeah, as I mentioned, my parents are Taiwanese. They immigrated here and I was born on the West Coast in the Bay Area, but they moved when I was just a baby to Las Vegas, Nevada, where I grew up. So, I think that’s what I identify as where I’m from and where I had community growing up. So, yeah, I stayed on the West Coast pretty much for most of my life. I went to undergrad in the L.A. area and I actually… My bachelor’s is in physics and computer science, so that’s actually where I started my crafting, because I was a very stressed-out physics major and I needed something to do with my hands, and also something to get my eyes off of a screen or out of a textbook, so that’s how I picked up knitting.

What was weird is that wasn’t my first time knitting, because I had definitely learned a couple of times, a few times, when I was little from people in my community. Just like my grandma used to knit and crochet before her arthritis set in, so she or one of her friends would teach me, because it was cute to teach a little kid how to knit. But I would never… Never stuck with it for more than an afternoon. And it wasn’t until college I think I had the maturity and attention span to actually sit down and do a project with it.

LaChaun Moore: It’s interesting to hear you talk about having such an extensive background in tech. In your bio, you stated that you use your fiber skills to entangle craft and tech. Can you go in depth with what that means and maybe some of the projects that you’ve worked on that illustrate that?

Shanel Wu: Yeah, definitely. I think that describes where I’m at with trying to reconcile both my creative and technical interests. I think I’ve always been a really creative person, but also really needing this technical rigor. But yeah, I was a really fidgety kid. I was not diagnosed with ADHD until a couple years ago, actually, so a while. And so, it’s kind of interesting to get this lens to look back on my past. Yeah, I loved drawing. I loved making things and crafts, but then I was also really into math, and robotics, and building stuff in that way, and so I think I’ve always looked for some way to merge those interests and not have them in conflict, because I think with the way my schooling experience was, it felt like I couldn’t have both. Like, “Oh, you need to take this calculus class, so you don’t have time to take a studio art class or something.”

And so, yeah, my undergrad was in physics, so kind of purely technical, and it was in senior year, my senior year of undergrad, that I took an art history course that was offered at my undergrad. My undergrad, Harvey Mudd College, is like a STEM liberal arts school, so they take a liberal arts approach to the sciences and they make you take a bit of everything, but they also have a humanities and arts requirement, which… You only have so much time in the day. It’s definitely hard to do everything. But as part of that, they did offer some really cool arts courses, and one of them was a course that I think has basically pointed me to my current research direction, which… Its title was Craft and Technology.

So, it was taught by Christy Matson, who’s a Jacquard weaver and just all-around awesome artist in the L.A. area. And so, she taught a history of craft that was really, yeah, entangled with tech. And it opened my eyes to seeing that craft, and working with materials in your environment, is a really old form of human technology. And it is what so much of what we see today with what we call technology, and forget about other forms of technology, with computers, smartphones, that’s all based on crafts in that there’s actually so much lineage from textile practices, and that’s really…

So, that framework I think really informed what I wanted to do when I graduated. I wanted to go into research because it is a… Research to me is a creative practice, but I wasn’t super interested in physics research because I didn’t see the possibilities I wanted for building something that actually mattered, or like immediately. So, you know, I could have some sort of optical setup and measure some important property, like subatomic particles, but I wouldn’t be able to see that actually affect… how maybe that would affect our… like the design of electronic systems until like 20, 50 years down the road. So, I think I needed the instant gratification of let me build. I want to build something.

And yeah, so when I found out that smart textiles and e-textiles was this field and research discipline, which by the way is just a general… The way I define it is the general concept of combining textiles, structures, like weaving, knitting, and techniques, too, felting, sewing, with digital electronics, sewing, or putting in sensors and circuits into textile things.

So, yeah, where I was going with all that was at this stage I guess in my practice, I see crafting as technology, and I also see the technology in our lives as crafted objects unto themselves.

LaChaun Moore: That’s so fascinating and so deep. I’ve never thought of it in that way.

Shanel Wu: I think it really… That perspective really spoke to me because I also see a lot of room for reframing tech outside of big tech and white dude programmers. So, by including all of these practices throughout human history as technology, which they should have been included from the start, but systems of privilege and all that, and colonialism, so it opens up much more room for just alternate dialogues of like, “Okay, how can we make better systems for our world?”

LaChaun Moore: Yeah, and I’m also thinking about just how a lot of the equipment, or machinery, or the technology in the fiber and textile system is so kind of antiquated, and there has kind of been a surge of interest in technology and sort of updating a lot of the ways in which we use fibers and textiles, and so that’s kind of where my mind went when you started to talk about it, and then the way that you put it which was so great was that you see fiber… Excuse me, that you see fiber-making techniques as technology. It’s just… and truthfully, it is. You know, it is technology, and its own way, it’s just… It’s sort of been ingrained in us to look at things, especially that are… I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a way to describe it. Like for me, the work that I do, it’s a lot of research based on ancestral methods, right? And those are techniques. That’s technology.

Shanel Wu: Yeah.

LaChaun Moore: And so, just thinking about everything that you said. It just kind of opened my mind a little bit in another way.

Shanel Wu: Nice! I’m so happy to hear that. Yeah. You have given me a little soapbox here and I kind of ran away with it. But yeah, that kind of immediate association of like, “Oh, textiles is old fashioned or low tech, and computers and shiny things and holograms are high tech.” And better because they’re new is that sort of cultural current I really try to push back on. Because yeah, a lot of these ancestral practices around the world are… It also goes back to sustainability. These ancestral practices and Indigenous peoples all over the world have maintained healthy relationships with their environment through their technologies of relating with each other, relating with the land, working with materials, and it’s something that our tech today doesn’t do.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. And there’s so much for us to learn from how these communities have been able to live and sustain using these technologies. It’s so interesting and it’s so fascinating to kind of think about it in that way. Thank you for bringing that.

Shanel Wu: Of course! Yeah. And I would love to hear at any point your perspectives on kind of the state of textiles today. Yeah. Because I was a self-taught crafter, I would love to hear more from maybe people in the more industrial side of textiles, like the people at the wool mills and stuff, so that’s why I love listening to your podcast.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting, right? Because right now, we see the fall of textiles, at least in the American textile industry, and it has a lot to do with a lot of companies taking their business overseas, and farmers not being able to sustain their crop. And yes, it has a lot to do with sending a lot of the sourcing overseas and the making of things overseas, but it also for me, in my research, I find has a lot to do with just starting out from a very unsustainable point, like the amount of farming that has been done specifically for crops like cotton is unsustainable. It is not a system that would have ever lasted and it’s kind of not able to keep up, because it started from a really unsustainable point. And that’s also very different, so also try to make sure that I differentiate commercial farming from smaller, small-scale farmers, because it’s a very, very, very different industry.

But yeah, commercial farming and the industrialization of farming, and Monsanto, and all of these really, really, really large entities, they really started out in what I would consider negative, and even in other conversations where I talk to people who work in the fashion aspect of things, they say the same thing. I believe it was a conversation with Lydia from California Cloth Foundry, she was… Really got to see the very beginning of the fast fashion industry.

Shanel Wu: Oh, boy.

LaChaun Moore: And she basically broke it down and said they started out on the wrong foot. They didn’t know what they were doing was as sustainable as it was, but it was never good. It wasn’t like the textile industry, and when I say textile industry, I don’t mean the making of textiles, or Indigenous people, or cultures who make things from fibers and keep it within their community. I mean like the industry of it really was never sustainable. It was never good, right? It never functioned in a good way.

And so, now we’re in a space where we’re seeing it fall and people are finally looking at sustainability, but it’s almost like they have no choice. Right? They have to because this ship has sailed.

Shanel Wu: Yeah. It was never intended to be an aspect of the system. Sustainability. And-

LaChaun Moore: Right.

Shanel Wu: Yeah. That definitely makes me think of how in my current field, which… In computing overall, I think a lot of people don’t really go back before maybe like World War II for the start of computing, because that’s when we had ENIAC and all these room-sized servers and so on. And if they really go back, they’ll maybe go to like the mechanical calculators of the late 1800s. And then in our lab, at least where we start talking about smart textiles and the entanglement of computing and digital technology with textiles, we start people with the Jacquard loom, because that is the earliest example they generally can think of. They’re like, “Oh yeah, Jacquard looms were early computers.” But I’m like, “Okay, let’s back it up even more. We’re easing you in. Baby steps, here.”

But think about all of the previous iterations of looms that the Jacquard loom was based on and that the Jacquard module was just an add on to earlier looms to begin with, and gradually got worked more and more into the system that focused on automation and industrialization. In my work, I like to take this historical approach of really interrogating where do these systemic problems, where did they start? How did they get encoded into everything?

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. And that’s such a huge question, right? Like it’s so… It’s massive. And it branches off into everything. Like everything is affected by it.

Shanel Wu: Yeah. I think that’s where my ADHD is both a blessing and a curse because I’m really lately just because yeah, I haven’t spent that much time with this clear lens on my brain, that with ADHD, I have a really hard time seeing ideas in isolation, which is really hard for writing and talking coherently. But it is definitely good for seeing those deeply hidden connections between things.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s almost… It’s also like being interdisciplinary and kind of drawing from multiple places and finding commonalities. That’s such a… I mean, it’s a telltale sign of a great artist, right?

Shanel Wu: Thanks.

LaChaun Moore: To be able to. You know?

Shanel Wu: Yeah. I definitely have been struggling with… Well, I can look at all these things and hold them, at least hold them in the same space, but what does output look like? What do I do with it? I think that’s why I had so much trouble with actually making something recently. Which could also just be this pandemic year.

LaChaun Moore: I think also, and this is something that I’ve learned and advice that I’ve gotten from other artists which I will share with you and also our listeners, is that as artists we go through seasons. And we go through moments of making, and even while we’re not physically making something, it’s a part of the process. You could just be developing the idea in your head for one or two years and by the time you actually get to the point where you can use your hands or your materials, there’s nothing blocking you. You’ve had this idea for so long, now you have the idea to bring it to fruition.

Shanel Wu: Yeah. That’s really comforting to hear. Thanks for sharing that.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. No problem. And also, I’m in the same boat. My first year farming, I didn’t make anything. I didn’t do any form of fiber art. And it was because that just wasn’t… that wasn’t my art. That wasn’t my medium at the moment. And then times when I’m making, I’m not necessarily thinking about farming or growing. But it is… It all informs each other. One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next, and it’s good to have that space or to have different spaces for things.

Shanel Wu: Definitely.

LaChaun Moore: But yeah, and I’m curious also, so I saw that you have… I don’t want to say recently, but I noticed sometime around last year you got a really beautiful floor loom.

Shanel Wu: Thanks.

LaChaun Moore: And I’m really curious if you can talk about your weaving practice specifically, what type of equipment you use?

Shanel Wu: Yeah. So, that floor loom… Man, I can’t believe it’s been about a year since I got it. I remember getting it. Now that you mention it, I recall it really vividly, and I can’t believe it’s been a whole year. But I got it the week that lockdown restrictions were going into effect in my area, or kind of officials and local authorities had just figured out all the regulations to put forth as the first version, so like late, mid-late March. But then on Facebook, so I was already in this headspace of like, “Oh my God, everything’s shifting. I need to figure out how to go get groceries now, or do this,” and was taking the bus to campus still safe? And then I was like crawling Facebook, Facebook marketplace, and I saw someone had posted this loom, was like, “Downsizing my craft equipment.” It was 300 bucks.

And I’m like, “Uh,

And I’m like, “Uh, I guess I could look at my accounts and see.” So, yeah, I was like, “Okay, can I swing this right now?” Yeah, I just cut myself off from overthinking. I’m like, “Okay, you know what? I’ll make it work. I can go to the ATM, grab that cash,” and I messaged the person, they responded right away, like this is all one afternoon, and I’m like, “Hey, roomies. Could I borrow a car?” It ended up being I asked the person for dimensions. It turned out the loom would not fit in either of my roommates’ cars, so I messaged a friend in the neighborhood and I’m like, “Hey, do you have a car with a big trunk?” And she was like, “Yeah. I’m a mom and I am in Colorado. We have a Subaru. This trunk can hold anything.” She’s like, “Do you need to borrow it? Here’s hand sanitizer and Clorox for after for sanitizing.”

And so, yeah, I went with one of my roommates and we drove to the other side of town, picked up this loom, and put it upstairs in what’s now my workspace. My work-from-home space.

So, yeah, I really love that I got this loom. There’s a story behind getting the loom, but then this loom already had a story when it came to me, because after talking with the previous owner, she was a local artist who weaving wasn’t so much in her practice anymore. I think she mentioned she teaches workshops with elementary schoolers and does a lot more felting, which makes sense. It’s easier to do that and teach the basics to kids. And so yeah, she had this loom that she had bought from her MFA school, where they were downsizing their loom collection, so yeah. It needed a bit of fixing up just from sitting in a garage when I got it, but it was really nice to clean it, oil it, get everything working, see what parts I needed to replace. It was in pretty good shape. It was mostly just the cleaning.

But yeah, I haven’t woven on it in recent months because I think… I know how to work with a few different kinds of looms. It was really nice to have a floor loom at home. Before this, if I did weaving at home, it was mostly stuff I could fit in my lap, like tapestry weaving or pin loom weaving. At my lab, so at my lab at CU Boulder, we do actually have a TC2 Jacquard loom, but that obviously I can’t take home. But I would go to the lab whenever I… and then there’s also a floor loom in the lab, so I got used to going to campus whenever I needed to do bigger weaving than just something I could have in my lap. And then with quarantine, I was like, “Uh, I need something at home in case I need to do bigger projects.”

Yeah. My weaving practice is kind of all over the place. I feel like it didn’t really start… Again, like knitting, I did it a few times as a kid. I think my parents still have the tapestry weaving that I made in first grade, where the art teacher told you how to cut slots into a paper plate and make a little loom. Which, I really… I hope I’m not putting my past self down. I really do like that little thing. It’s good job, little Shanel.

LaChaun Moore: They’re so great. I love all of the different types of looms and they also make weaving so accessible, as well.

Shanel Wu: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That’s one thing I like to emphasize about weaving, and I think Anni Albers, in her On Weaving essays said it best, where it was like… I’m paraphrasing badly here, that the elegance of weaving is that given enough time and patience, even on the simplest loom, you can do, just picking by hand, what the most advanced Jacquard loom can weave. It’s just the overs and unders. And I really love that about textiles.

So, yeah, I definitely experiment with a lot of techniques and different equipment configurations. Yeah. I have some trouble making bigger pieces because I spend all my time I feel like experimenting. But yeah, I am proud that on my floor loom last spring I was able to weave two fairly large projects. I wove a cover for my office chair, just as a test rectangle, the first time I warped up the loom and just wove the entire warp and saw how much… I guess how much excess would be left at the beginning and end of the warp. Yeah, I turned that into just a cover for my office chair.

And then I did weave a vest on my frame loom as the next project, which is really fun, to weave a whole garment.

LaChaun Moore: Wow. And how did that go?

Shanel Wu: It was kind of a stressful project because I committed to doing it as a class project and then I’m like, “Oh no. Final presentation’s in two weeks and I said I would do this.” So, I warped the thing and wove the entire vest and was like… It was like 3:00 or 4:00 AM before the presentation, which was like at 9:00 AM, and I was weaving in the ends.

LaChaun Moore: Wow. I can imagine. I know I have trunks of half-finished projects from when I was in school.

Shanel Wu: Yeah. I’m that way with sewing. Sewing is so hard for me to finish because it’s all finishing for me.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. I have so many jackets where I just need to finish the lining and the sleeve, or I need to connect these two pieces, or I didn’t put buttons. Things like that. So, I definitely feel that. I’m really curious about your YouTube page or YouTube channel. It’s so interesting. I watched a few of the videos and I’m curious if you can talk about it, what inspired you to start sharing on YouTube and also some of the series that you have on there?

Shanel Wu: Yeah. My YouTube in recent years has gotten pretty sporadic, but I started uploading videos about my knitting pretty early on after I started knitting. So, I mentioned I started, I taught myself how to knit in college, and it was from YouTube with a bunch of YouTube tutorials, and I also stumbled into the world of knitting podcasts and videos on YouTube, and that was this really cool way of people who… It seemed like a lot of people felt isolated in their own practices, so they would just kind of you podcasting and sharing their projects as a way to reach out to other crafters who might be in similar situations.

And I kind of felt that as a STEM major who it was kind of… I didn’t get flack for it, or necessarily shamed for it, but it was I didn’t really have anyone else to geek out about like knitting lace patterns, or getting into spinning my yarn as a… Yeah, I just didn’t have anyone else to really talk about that with. Eventually, I did rope in enough of my friends that we had a decent knitting group, but that was because I taught them.

So, yeah, it started with that. I have not done a podcast episode because it ended up being too much of what felt like a production, that I just didn’t have bandwidth for. But it is a… I want to hold onto it as a way of sharing my practice, sharing parts of my research, and kind of getting over that same stage fright I felt before starting to record this interview with you. Because if I am to stay in academic research, my work output will have to be publications that I hit submit on and kind of just put out into the world. So, yeah, particular series on that, I remember you mentioned in particular Unfabricate and Sister Strands.

I’ll start with Sister Strands because that was a nice trip down memory lane. So, this was after I had… Right after I graduated my undergrad, I had moved to New Jersey for a couple years, where I was teaching, but then also just kind of taking a break from tech. I freelanced a lot more as a knitwear designer and also as an instructor, mostly at a yarn store in… which is called Yarnia, which is such a great name. And so, this was done in collaboration with Marce, or Marceline, and her screen name is Hey BrownBerry all over the net, and she’s a really good friend that I met through knitting Instagram, and that’s where I have a lot of appreciation for how digital platforms can help us form communities, and we just started.

We both kind of had a similar approach to knitting in that we like to reverse engineer techniques, or just kind of like really to focus on the process of learning and exploring a craft, and she was starting to learn how to dye yarn, and I was learning more about spinning, especially with different forms of preparations of fiber. And I had just been to a local fiber festival and picked up some unspun wool of two different breeds. Can’t remember. I think one was Corriedale. One was maybe BFL. Why do I remember these things but not like… I don’t know.

So, I bought two different breeds of wool and I was like, “Hey, Marce, do you want to do an experiment where we split these in half? We have two different breeds of wool. Same preparation. What about we do something where we split them in two again, split each batch of wool in half. I’ll send you half of each. And so, I have four ounces of one breed, four ounces of another breed. I’ll spin the yarn. I’ll spin them undyed into yarn. One skein each. And then you’ll dye it in the wool. You’ll dye it in the roving. And then we’ll swap. And then you dye the spun yarn, I will spin the dyed roving, and we’ll see what happens.” So, that was a really fun exchange.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah, and I also enjoyed watching that video, and I also enjoyed watching Unfabricate as well, which is like a presentation. I’m really curious if you can kind of talk about that, as well?

Shanel Wu: So, Unfabricate, that presentation that you saw on YouTube was… What I’ve been mentioning about like the output, I… It was a research project that I started first as just kind of a side project and personal exploration and was able to write into a research paper to publish in my field about designing smart textiles for assembly and just FYI, when I say smart textiles, you can basically interpret that to mean all textiles, because I do see what we call traditional textiles as smart before we started using that buzzword.

There are some earlier videos there on my YouTube of me taking apart some sweaters that I got from the thrift store and unraveling them for yarn. And yeah, kind of trying to reverse engineer their creation process. Because the whole thing that got me started on that disassembly was kind of going back to what I was saying about there are things that textiles can do that our computers can’t, and one is to be able to take apart, and recycle, and reuse their materials easily. Easily in that it’s still a time-consuming process, but it’s built into all of the structures that we use. We don’t glue the yarns together. We just weave and knit them into loops, and they can unravel because of that. And it would be so nice to be able to completely and easily take apart your computer without releasing a bunch of toxic chemicals and maybe have to use them to patch up your air conditioning around the house or something.

And so, I did those kind of like firsthand unraveling experiences as a kind of design ethnography of the objects themselves. And yeah, from there kind of design a… Those were all knits, and so since my lab focuses on woven textiles, I started to try incorporating what I found about what makes knits unravelable into a woven structure, and then used that as a proof of concept for, okay, if we can modify the structures of our smart textiles for the future, and if we can modify the tools that we’re using to make them, can this translate into bigger lessons for how to manufacture technology and hardware that’s more sustainable and reusable?

And so, that’s what you see as the presentation which was presented in lieu of all the conferences being cancelled last year. So, I gave a virtual talk.

LaChaun Moore: Yeah. And it’s also so excellent and thank you for kind of giving us a synopsis of what you talked about, and also talking to us about the range of topics that your work touches on. Can you tell our listeners where they can find your YouTube and also links to follow you on social media?

Shanel Wu: Yeah. So, I am at Piper Nell, that’s just kind of the screen name that has happened in the past few years. That’s P-I-P-E-R N-E-L-L. So, I’m on YouTube under that username as well as Instagram, and you can also find my work on my personal/portfolio website, sminliwu.github.io. And yeah, best way to reach me would be Instagram or emailing me at pipernellart@gmail.com, because I would love to be in dialogue with anyone who’s interested in talking about the themes that I’m working with, how to make better systems and taking lessons from textiles to the world, because yeah, I’ve learned that while I can build things and make things in isolation, the only way these things have meaning is if I actually have conversations with the people who might take it up and build more things with it or use it.

LaChaun Moore: Amazing. Thank you so much and I have one question for you before you go, and it’s a question that we ask everyone that joins the podcast, and that is do you have any advice or words of wisdom to share with weavers and textile enthusiasts?

Shanel Wu: Every time you ask that on episodes I listen to, I’m like, “Oh, what would I say?” And then I say, “Oh, no.” Just try it. If you make a mistake, you can turn it into a feature, or learn something bigger about the process. So, just try it and see what happens.

LaChaun Moore: Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate everything that you’ve shared with us.

Shanel Wu: Thanks for talking to me, LaChaun. I’m so honored to be here. And I look forward to keeping in touch.

LaChaun Moore: Absolutely.

That’s a wrap. If you’re interested in seeing images of Shanel’s work or to read a full transcript of this week’s episode, you can find links in the show notes at www.gistyarn.com/episode-137. As always, thank you for tuning into this week’s episode. Until next time, happy weaving!