wasn’t until recently (2009) that I realized that emulators existed and rediscovered a lot of the old games I used to play. I’ve since acquired actual hardware and now try to do a lot of things I never was able to do when I was younger, such as programming.
images are fantastical, surreal and invented. I used the horizontal format for the weavings because it referenced both the tradition of narrative storytelling via tapestry weaving (Bayeux Tapestry for example) as well as the format for how the game is laid out (i.e. when the protagonist, Bobbin Threadbare walks off the screen to the left, the entire landscape changes frame by frame.) The Jacquard seemed a great output method for these piece too because of its historical connections to the early computing technology. In fact, in the game LOOM, there is a “great loom” that more or less reigns over what’s left of the planet (the game takes place in the future, in a postapocalyptic environment. the Earth has been destroyed by technology and the only survivors are craftspeople: Weavers, Blacksmiths, and Shepherds.) The landscapes are actually beautiful when woven. I used a cotton yarn together with a stainless
Mathias Jansson: Christy your experience with the adventure game Loom, published by Lucasfilms Games in 1990, resulted in the project Loomscape. Can you tell me why you choosed the game Loom? Christy Matson: I knew I wanted to use the game Loom as source material for a project. I had been combining sound and hand-weaving for a number of years so this game was right up my alley. Up to this point, I had mainly been using the Jacquard loom to weave abstract imagery, but this felt like the perfect opportunity to combine weaving and representational imagery. I liked that while referencing landscapes, the
steel yarn. The pieces were washed after I made them and the cotton shrank in way that the stainless steel did not. The surface of the pieces is actually quite dimensional and tactile. Although the pieces are presented flat and stretched, they had a 3D surface quality to them that I think contrasts nicely with the flat quality of the screen in the game.
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