Textile design research is a rapidly growing research area that broadly aims to discuss the ubiquitous role of textiles across various intersecting fields including technology, health care, sports, health and well-being, and artistic practices. Textile design research often utilizes textile thinking as a notion elemental to the design process, where the thinking, making, knowing with, in, and of itself, bound up within the agencies of the materials themselves. Here, the focus moves beyond the tangible design outcome to suggest other forms and practices of knowledge-making that transcends disciplinary boundaries, even manifesting in immaterial design outcomes. 

This artistic research explores the ways in which electromagnetic fields can be expressed through textile materials and textile design processes. To do this, scientific and artistic nuances of both the tangible textile material and the intangible electromagnetic phenomena must be articulated. The framework presented includes artistic methods and tools used to design radiant textile systems, which present in the liminal space between textiles and free space. The framework introduces new notions for qualifying electromagnetic phenomena in the context of textile design, and that opens toward new textile interactions. 

The purpose of this presentation is to provide an example of how artistic research can fluidly move between the scientific and the artistic, and when given this freedom, it begins to articulate relations found in the interstices between practice, methods, and tools, and the developments therein, and lead to theory development in the context of textile-based artistic research. This presentation will include video, audio, and photographic materials that demonstrate the ways in which the artistic research has been carried out to date, and design examples that have been made using the framework, methods, and tools developed within the research.