By Sindhu Ananthavel
Sarah Rosalena Brady, an interdisciplinary artist and UCSB assistant professor of Art in Computational Craft and Haptic Media, merges modern technology with Indigenous practices in her work, which was recently exhibited at the LA County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
UCSB Art professor Sarah Rosalena Brady in her Los Angeles studio.
Rosalena grew up in Los Angeles and learned crafting from watching her grandmother —a Huichol (Wixárika) weaver and beader — and she now specializes in computational craft. Her art fuses analog and digital mediums to explore concepts of image-making and colonialism. She creates 3D prints and hand-produces weaving and beading from data sets. Through her work, Rosalena has been able to expand perceptions of contemporary art and foster interdisciplinary discourse with scientists and engineers.
She recently spoke to about her life path and her work at the intersection of the digital and the traditional.
Q: What was your introduction to visual art and how did you find your niche?
A: I’ve always been drawn to visual art. My grandmother was a weaver and she inspired me a lot, so I was always very creative and knew I was going to be an artist.
I found my niche through understanding textile, because it’s something that’s very conceptual and requires a lot of thought and programming in advance, with or without a computer. You have to design a pattern and implement it line by line. Working in that way provided me a vantage point where I could understand visuals through abstraction, so I was always really good with computer programming and code.
When I was studying to be an artist I found an easy correlation between computer programming and craft. I also found history between the origins of the computer and Ada Lovelace who wrote the first computer program, and even the histories of women actually being titled as ‘computers.’ So this solidified my interest in not only thinking about weaving and craft and different forms of visual making as an artist, but also implementing different ways that you could generate abstraction through code.
Q: Can you elaborate a little on women as computers, and how that’s represented through your work?
A: Yes. Before we think of modern computers that we have today, that was a title given to people who are hired to do complex math equations and processes and were titled ‘computers.’ Predominantly they were named women. But a lot of that labor has been now carried over to what we think of as modern computing today, such as classification processing, data and pattern recognition. Before we had computers, it was women.
So, I'm kind of examining myself as a computer in the process of my work because it’s about how I'm thinking about patterns and visuals through the context of having a background as a weaver, and implementing that through digital processes such as software on an electronic loom and other forms. Much of what I do at UCSB is different forms of digital fabrication such as ceramic 3D printing, where I expand upon textile. My work in the woven form of ceramics has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and most recently the Columbus Museum of Art.
‘Exit Point,’ a textile reproducing pixel images of the Blue Marble and the Black Hole, by UCSB interdisciplinary art professor Sarah Rosalena Brady.
Q: What does the artistic process of translating digital imaging to hand woven work look like?
A: I design my patterns through software. I will make a weave draft through pixels and bitmaps using a variety of different tools, such as processing, Photoshop, and artificial intelligence —such as generative adversarial networks — to generate them as a weave draft. I then upload it into my loom and hand weave as it's processing. At the same time, some of my works don't have any computers at all. I can see myself as the computer and as the algorithm and I'll weave on very traditional Indigenous looms, such as my mother's bead loom, or a backstrap loom.
Q: What kinds of conversations have you had with people observing your work?
A: I feel really grateful to have gotten a lot of discourse with people in the sciences. I've done a lot of collaborations with NASA and JPL. I was featured on NPR Science Friday, this year and also mentioned in an article on Indigenous innovation in National Geographic.
Through Stanford Arts, I did workshops with engineering students and was commissioned to make two large textiles during my time there, so it was great to be in dialogue with cutting edge researchers in AI who are still understanding the processes of artificial intelligence. I’m using art to spark conversation where there is still a lot of room for discovery.
Q: Bringing it back to Santa Barbara, what brought you to your exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art?
A: I met the director of that museum Freddy Janka when I was an advisor for Getty Pacific Standard Time in the topic Art Science, Los Angeles. I'm in five exhibitions for that convening. He saw my work and was very interested in working with me. At the time he was not the director but was in charge of the Carolyn Glasgoe Bailey Foundation, which is based in Ojai. When he became director, he selected me to be their first exhibition under his helm at that space, and I was very delighted to not only represent my work but also be the first person to show at that time.
The show was a reflection on research that I did previous years, thinking about the cosmos and how we measure space. This was a show of rethinking stars through Indigenous star patterns and how that could be a method to look back at us, but also re-imagine what how they're seen and how they're viewed in the context of innovation and colonial discovery.
‘Spiral Arm Red,’ a textile utilizing a four-pointed star pattern motif to produce glitches when weaving an image of the Milky Way. Created by Sarah Rosalena Brady.
Q: What other work do you do at UCSB?
A: I joined UCSB in 2019. My position is computational craft and haptic media [technology that transmits tactile information], and my research fully supports that. I do a lot of research in ceramic 3d printing, digital weaving, and anything revolving around craft and digital fabrication. I teach courses on the intersection of digital and analog processes, in which we think about ourselves and our bodies as algorithms in the context of textile and circuits. And then I teach a larger course for 200 students on art, science and technology, which is really a class about thinking conceptually about interdisciplinary practice.
Q: Are most of these students being introduced to this art for the first time?
A: A lot of times I'm introducing it to them for the first time, not only for art students, but for students in the sciences. I really like bridging people through different departments and different disciplines, because a lot of that speaks to the issues that we're facing today, such as climate change, social justice, and equity and technology. Being an artist discussing emerging technology, I always find something that's very holistic because it really addresses humanity's culture and the future.
Q: If you had any advice to offer to young artists who are in this digital medium, what would you say?
A: Experiment. Fail. Do something different. Don't be afraid of disciplines, be interdisciplinary. Join things together, combine something handmade with something that you designed digitally because you'll always come up with something new.
Sindhu Ananthavel is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara studying Communication and minoring in Professional Writing in the Journalism track. She is also a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.