Maria José Ríos Araya
Systems thinking is an approach that analyses reality as a set of interconnected elements whose interactions generate properties and behaviours that cannot be understood in isolation. Within this framework, value lies in recognising the relationships, feedback loops, and dynamics that shape a living, evolving system.
From my practice as a media artist, this perspective frames The Woven Skin: my thesis project as a relational ecosystem where art, design, and technology intertwine. The textile functions as an interactive interface linking the tactile with the digital, establishing a system of symbolic coding and emergent communication.
The Woven Skin proposes and is projected to produce, within the art–design framework, interactive and systemic interfaces, systemic because they generate a dialogue with cognition capable of producing symbolic meaning through bodily engagement and multisensory interaction. These surfaces function as hybrid communication systems: tactile, audible, visual, and symbolic, conceived as “third skins” that mediate between the human, the environment, and the system. They resonate with Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media as extensions of the body and Félix Guattari’s ecosophy, where subjectivity, media, and environments form integrated ecologies that operate as modes of knowledge, inserting greater subjective interpretation into what is measurable, as in the case of data.
Through a textile interface with 24 conductive zones, each linked to a sound and a visual sign, the work proposes a proto-writing system: a constellation of signs that is not fixed but relational and emergent. Activated through touch, the interface allows for sonic and visual codifications that are recombined in real-time, operating rhizomatically (Deleuze & Guattari) to enable non-linear forms of expression and knowledge production where material, data, and sensory experience coexist in continuous transformation. This approach is rooted in embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch), recognising that meaning emerges from the interplay between bodily engagement, material properties, and technological mediation. By weaving together tactile gestures, sonic events, and visual inscriptions, the work challenges the conventional boundaries between language, notation, and performance, opening a space where affect, memory, and data intersect.
Keywords: systemic thinking, textiles, textiles interface, proto-writing, embodied interaction, media ecology, participatory art, cultural systems, multisensory design