Facing Touch

Textiles

2011

Lia Cook (American, born 1942)

Lia Cook has long been occupied by issues of sensory perception. In addition to visual concerns, she has considered the sense of touch and how our brains react to the desire for tactile contact. Cook worked with scientists to compare the brain’s response to viewing a woven image of a face with the response to viewing a photographic image of the same woven face. She discovered that seeing the woven image triggered greater activity in that part of the brain affected most by touch. Facing Touch illustrates this experiment. The test subject, dressed in a cap trailing the sensors that measure his neural responses, reaches out to touch a woven image, actually an enlarged version of Cook’s own Binary Traces: Young Girl, created in 2004.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Textiles

Artist: Lia Cook
Title: Facing Touch
Place: California (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: Made 2011
Medium: Cotton and rayon, weaving on digital hand loom
Dimensions: 137.2 × 130.2 cm (54 × 51 1/4 in.)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by the Textile Society
Reference Number: 2016.79

Lia Cook, Weaving & Innovation, Digital Fibers Converse with Neural Networks, exh. cat. (Madison, WI: Ruth Davis Design Gallery with University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2013), cover (ill.).
Lucy Johnston, Digital Handmade: Craftsmanship in the New Industrial Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 49 (ill.).

Madison, WI, Ruth Davis Design Gallery at the School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Weaving & Innovation, Digital Fibers Converse with Neural Networks, Feb. 1-Apr. 7, 2013, cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, Elizabeth F. Cheney and Agnes Allerton Textile Galleries, A Global View: Recent Acquisitions of Textiles, 2012-2016, Apr. 8-Sept. 5, 2016.

The artist, Berkeley, CA; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.