AVIONICS series

on-going project

(2020-)

 

Avionics is an 7-part series of tapestries depicting civil aviation accidents through immense vertical spectrographic images, the orange color of which calls back to the aerospatial industry. The series’ title refers to the electronic systems on an aircraft, and particularly to the communications’ equipment .

 

These tapestries represent the spectral decompositions of the last moments of plane crash victims.

Erected as a lighthouse among crashing waves, each recording represents a unique tragedy, making up a brief anthology of civil deflagrations that ultimately contributed to the progress of aviation technology.

 

Through the spectral motifs, speech emerges in an upwards motion, counter to the downward hurdling of the plane crash.

The weft of the tapestry evokes the physicality of the soundscape; the space between the vertical warp strings underlines the sequentiality of the metronome, which paces the work’s visual transcription.

 

Concomitantly, the tapestry echoes the myth of Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, who drew up a rivalry with Athena as a product of her hubris in defying the goddess in a tapestry competition.

To make her piece more complex, Arachne added the dimension of creative interpretation by including a plurality of narratives into her tapestry.

This intricacy brought Arachne to win the competition, but to lose her human form: in a fit of anger, Athena turned Arachne into a spider.

This myth calls attention to the controversiality of art which highlights and questions entrenched perspectives.

Here, the narrative trumps the illustration, as Avionics is a polyphony of voices, transfigurated and brought to the fore.