Nicole Yi Messier is a new media artist and educator with a focus on storytelling, craft, and community. Her practice mixes both physical and digital technologies into installations and experiences that unleash exploratory forms of interaction. Her work spans across mediums including textiles, physical computing, and code. Nicole also teaches as a part-time faculty for creative technology and coding at Parsons School of Design.
“‘Ancient Futures’ is a multi-layered woven textile whose surface visually fluctuates based on the sentiment analysis of visitors’ shared secrets. It is a participatory media installation capturing sonic textures and creating an evolving fabric of soundscape. Throughout history, technical methods in textiles have hidden and delivered sensitive details and encoded important messages. In collaboration with Victoria Manganiello, I am creating a modern precedent in this textile tradition to connect the past and future. I will explore through making and workshop facilitation how this technology will be vintage, just as past techniques were novel yet are now common and nearly invisible.”