Alicia DeVrio is a fiber artist & researcher whose work explores ways to resist, break, and reconfigure restrictive structures. She has been artist-in-residence at Praxis Fiber Workshop’s Digital Weaving Lab and Contemporary Craft’s Fibers Studio, has visited East Tennessee State University’s Art and Design Department, and has been awarded by the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh for her weaving. She recently defended her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where her dissertation investigated how people affected by harmful impacts of AI systems fight back by leveraging and reconfiguring structures of power in whatever ways they can. Throughout, she has been inspired by research drawing parallels between 19th-century Luddite resistance to textile automation and resistance to big tech today, as well as HCI literature on the connections between making and unmaking that contends that acts of dismantling—of taking apart—are simultaneously acts of creation.
Tyler School of Art and Architecture
In this talk, fiber artist and researcher, Alicia DeVrio, will discuss questions that animate her artistic work related to the tensions involved in breaking and making: What happens when larger systems are fractured? Can the resultant chaos be generative, revealing its own sort of order? What is pattern—and what might it look like to unmake and reclaim rigid ones, to explore how the experience of broken structures is relational, personally felt, and holds potential for repair? How can breaking problematic, restrictive structures open more expansive, radical possibility spaces for the future? She will share how she experiments in her practice with different material potentials and design methodologies—such as leaving large sections unwoven to droop away from the cloth, algorithmically modifying existing structures to make them irregular, and altering scale so that patterns grow or shrink to be embedded inside themselves—experiments that aim to trouble perceptions of where structure begins and ends.
This event is made possible by the General Activities Fund (GAF)
OPEN TO: Public