BBC Click talks to Annie Warburton, Creative Director of Crafts Council and the artist Karina Thompson about fusing robotics and textiles. Karina has been working closely with the Centre for Robotic Research at Kings College London, thread producers Benton and Johnson and Pfaff sewing machines to integrate e-textiles into her studio pieces. Karina’s research was presented by Kings College London at the Crafts Council’s Make:Shift conference that features pioneering makers, scientists and technologists and their work in craft to enable innovation in various industries.

To hear Karina speak about her work go to 14.3 minutes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04gccj6

Karina’s work produced from this research, ‘All the things you are not yet (Cloth of Gold)’, is an interactive embroidered and printed textile piece currently exhibiting at Made in the Middle.

‘October 2013: a young woman leans over a medical technician’s shoulder and takes a photograph of a computer monitor with her mobile phone. On the screen are images of two bundles of cells, which the technician is about to implant in her womb. They go on to grow into her two sons, Rufus and Rafe. That mobile phone photograph has been printed onto this fabric which has then been embroidered. When the quilt is touched a sound file of the boys singing ‘Twinkle twinkle’ is triggered and played through embroidered speakers.’